Virtuosity vs. Mere Cleverness

So, like many Americans I like violent, scary movies (though the line is really drawn for me at extreme amounts of gore). Lately, I've been watching a ton of horror/thriller films. When Funny Games, Michael Haneke's 2007 Austrian film was remade into an English language film starring Naomi Watts this year, I was desperately curious to see it, mainly because of Haneke's claims in promotional interviews for the film that he remade the film for American audiences because he wanted to confront Americans with their own violence. This claim sounded like a red herring to me from the get go. I went to see it expecting to be terrified, which I half was and half wasn't (I'm sure it didn't help that at every suspenseful moment in the movie, the man who had fallen asleep in the theater–whose snore sounded like a pig being slaughtered: loud, high-pitched, and punctuated with snorts–would ratchet up his snoring). The story is about a family who's held captive and tortured to death in their own home by extremely polite strangers. The movie is at times very suspenseful, but falls majorly flat in the the philosophical interrogation of the magnitude of human sadism department.

Naomi Watts is great in Funny Games; she's fast becoming a horror movie icon in her ability to play the hunted, haunted, fragile white woman that is so prevalent in the genre. Michael Pitt, who plays the psychotic leader of the Leopold and Loeb-like pair who carry out the home invasion is cruelly brilliant. But more than highly stylized art house torture porn it is certainly not. Why? Because the whole tone of the film is ruined by obnoxiously clever editing. For example, in one of the final scenes, Naomi Watts manages to snatch a shotgun off the coffee table and gun down one of her assailants in an attempt to rescue her husband from being murdered. As soon as the viewer feels a sense of relief, the film is rewound to the point just before Watts can get her hands on the shotgun and the torturers see her trying to grab the gun, take it away from her and kill her husband anyway. This kind of cleverness gives the film a tone of glibness. It's one thing as a filmmaker to tell a story of the unspeakable horrors of which people are capable, but when the character's lives are played with through the editing and formal aspects of the work in the way that they are in Funny Games, when no ethical weight is given to their lives or deaths, one questions whether the critique that Haneke is claiming to enact about our compulsion as Americans, as viewers, to watch violence is a really misplaced critique. One asks oneself, who lacks compassion, me as the viewer, me as the American, or him as the filmmaker for whom death is an exercise jokey post-modernism? Also, in light of recent events, one questions whether the types of horrors depicted in Funny Games are not actually more indigenous to the film's native Austria.

Seeing Funny Games kick started my recent obsession with horror movies, sort of an independent study in what constitutes an effective horror movie, what is horror and how is it made? The Korean film A Tale of Two Sisters (2003 directed by Kim Ji-woon) has done much to answer these questions. The movie succeeds in being actually suspenseful/scary and stylized without being glib ala the aformentioned movie. A Tale of Two Sisters centers around a family–two sisters, a father, and a stepmother. The story itself is not so remarkable, it's pretty much a classic gothic horror story of domestic tensions pushed to murderous limits. There's little character development and hardly any dialogue (most of the lines are delivered in screams). Everything you come to know about the family and all the thrills and chills are derived from the deployment of pieces of the story through editing. A Tale of Two Sisters is so masterfully edited and structured that it doesn't need to show you that much explicit imagery. It haunts you as much with what it shows you as what it doesn't. In one scene, a girl is visited in the middle of the night by a ghost shrouded in black which keeps coming closer and closer, but every time it moves closer, the camera cuts so that you see a series of closeups of slightly parting black fabric. The effect is chilling. More importantly, this film derives its depth through the psyhcological traumas that it enacts formally rather than through the cheap didactic tactics of a film like Funny Games. To me, there's is something irreducible, unspeakable, unknowable about horror which is captured in A Tale of Two Sisters. Somehow there's much less horror in the much more grim exercise of watching some vaguely unlikeable yuppies, American or Austrian, being tortured to death.

Another Part of the New World / New York

April 24th 1982 was the day my parents first set foot in New York, arriving on a plane from Bogotá. They were on their way to Paris on vacation, but instead they stayed here. It was Spring time.

Vogue, I Really Must Quit You.

I have been a faithful Vogue reader for years, since Alex helped me justify this habit to myself. Yes, Vogue, that bastion of capitalist pornography. But what can I say, I love high fashion. I've never been interested in the whiter teeth, thinner thighs, or the perfect manicure of Glamour nor have I looked to Cosmopolitan for better orgasms or the most uncomfortable thongs. Once upon a time, Vogue didn't preach to you; Ms. Wintour may have always hated fat people like the dickens but she would never stoop so low as to let the plebian masses in on her weightloss secrets because the magazine really should be about the almost criminal beauty of a Christian LaCroix (remember Noami Wolff's indictment of the French designer in The Beauty Myth?) dress that most readers can't afford anywho. And so maybe I can't afford ten thousand dollar dresses, but I can afford the five dollars every month to see a fantasy of chiffon and sequins perched on the highest heels imaginable. I love the unwearable fashions of haute couture, although I'll surely never wear them. And Vogue knows that there are many readers like me, who may never wear the clothes represented in their pages, but want to glimpse the beauty of the the clothes. While I don't believe that clothing is the ultimate expression of individuality, I do believe that clothing is densely coded with social signifiers, am fascinated by how clothing is both an architecture around the body, and how clothing can highlight the architecture of the body. In a funny way, the magazine is like a museum for clothing. Although in tone, the magazine is aimed at socialites, the income demographics of Vogue readers are actually lower than other fashion magazines like InStyle, which features very wearable, approachable looks for the extremely well-to-do woman. The loathsome term aspirationalism is used to describe the phenomenon whereby regular people buy magazines like Vogue, but this has always struck me as stupid marketing bullshit. So I've kept reading.......not because I aspire to anything, but because I love clothes the way I love paintings and poems.

But Anna Wintour has gone too far this time. Besides the incredibly racist cover of the April 'Shape' Issue, which featured James LeBron and Gisele basically posed as Godzilla and fair white kidnapee, respectively, the April issue contained a story about how Vogue called up the Rodarte designers, Laura and Kate Mulleavy and offered to help them lose weight. The magazine payed for the sisters to go on a diet that included a personal trainer and a chef. Laura and Kate Mulleavy have been producing eccentric, diaphonous gowns from the bedroom of their childhood home in Pasadena under the name 'Rodarte' for the past three years. Their meteoric rise to fame has been so satisfying mostly because they're soooo talented, but partly because they seem so humble and normal and secure enough in themselves that they didn't need to conform to the fashion industry's standard of thinness. I can't even wrap my head around how fucked up this is–as if the usual pressures of the fashion industry weren't alienating enough as a young and not-rail-thin designer, Anna Wintour calls you and explicitly tells you 'you must lose weight.' My jaw is still on the floor. Part of me wonders whether this has to do with the fact that Laura and Kate are young women so industry people like Wintour feel like they have the right to dictate something as personal as weight to these girls. I wonder if anyone would have dared to tell Karl Lagerfeld to lose weight in his larger years?

What We Talk About When We Talk About Reading

Khalil Huffman's blog, Every Book Since January, on which he's been listing every book he's read since July 2006 has gotten me thinking about how many books I read a year. It's one thing to be a voracious reader, but it's another thing to document what your reading–it creates an interesting window into a person's intellectual life. It's made me start to document (in my journal), what I've been reading and the different ways that I read.

I realize that sometimes I will read the first ten to twenty pages of several books in what I call the "trial period" before I decide on any one book to invest my time in or that I very often read almost all the way to the end of a book then put it down and never finish it–Jose Donoso's The Obscene Bird of Night–why did I read you to your 570th page only to not finish you? And lately, several books have been sharing my attention equally, a book for every situation: William Gaddis' The Recognitions for home (because it's big and heavy), The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (poetry for home), Jane Jacob's The Life and Death of Great American Cities (for commuting), and Jean Day's Odes and Otium for my lunch break (although I have to admit that mostly I end up carrying the book around in my purse rather than reading it, which has more to do with my shortish attention span than the quality of the book). Sometimes I am able to get a fair amount of reading done through this method of book-to-match-situation and sometimes not so much. One thing this method robs me of is the grand sense of accomplishment derived from long stretches of complete attention to one text. At the end of the day, my reading habits don't necessarily match up to my idea of myself as Serious Reader. In some ways, I am a serious reader, an immersive one. If I'm really into a book, I can spend a whole Saturday in bed reading, only getting up to do absolutely necessary things. But the whole apparatus of work and routine and social life interfere with the quiet and stillness demanded of that kind of intensive reading.

Yet somehow through this chaos, I've managed to read a few whole books this year:

Fredrick Nyberg's A Different Practice
Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
Bhanu Kapil's Incubation: A Space for Monsters
Roberto Bolaño's Distant Star
Chip Delany's Dhalgren
Julio Cortazar's The Diary of Andres Fava
Javier Cercas' The Soldiers of Salamis
Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Jack Spicer's The Collected Books


'Every Book Since January' has also made me wonder what other people have been reading since January. So, what have you read?

Check it

Ms. Dumont's new blog A Vernacular Architecture is awesome.

Finally!

Mark Penn has been fired.

Obviously too little too late, but at least it's something.

Collusion or Conflict of Interests?

Mark Penn, Hillary's chief strategist met with Colombian officials to discuss a Colombian free-trade pact that Hillary opposes. Penn met the officials as part of his lobbying firm, Burton-Marsteller, not as a Clinton representative. I love how they're so cynical in the Clinton camp that they can claim with a straight face that a lobbyist working as an independent contractor for a campaign, can lobby against the interest of that campaign and that it's not a conflict of interest. What's more ridiculous is that Penn didn't even try to hide it; he just went and met with Colombian ambassador publicly. Above board is the new under the table.

This kind of situation begs one to wonder whether this is even a conflict of interest for Hillary or ultimately beneficial. Free-trade pacts are hugely economically beneficial (in the short- term to the U.S.), but lefty democrats and labor unions hate them because they promote human rights abuses in the countries where they go through and they ship even more American jobs overseas (witness NAFTA, everybody's favorite Clintonian Republicrat legislation from the 90's!). In order to bolster intra-party support, Clinton can't openly support the Colombian free trade pact, but she can keep the door open through her greasy, lobbyist director of PR, Mark Penn.

This free-trade pact, which Bush is pushing to go to Congress next week despite opposition from congressional democrats and labor unions, would ensure that that war-on-drugs money keeps rolling in and would expand the power that multi-national corporations like Coca-Cola (which has already racked up a tidy number of human rights abuses) have in the Colombia.

What Is Your Work Worth, Really?

I am no economist, but a question which obsesses me is why the pay scale of American jobs is structured so that any worker who is involved in cultural work gets payed lower than any other kind of worker. I am completely at a loss as to why the more specialized reading, writing, editing, or teaching skills a job requires, the less you are likely to get paid. The fact that writing-related skills are so poorly remunerated strikes me as counter-intuitive, since at the high school and college level, most students struggle with writing skills, the economic logic of supply and demand would seem to dictate that people with good writing skills entering the workforce would be fewer, thus more valuable, thus well-paid. But in fact, the opposite is true: barely literate stockbrokers rule the world! The aformentioned fact is not terribly surprising to me because people who get paid to move money around have always been paid better than people who don't move money around; what's shocking and revealing to me is the difference in pay between the people who move money around in the humanities and the people who actually teach and write and do the actual cultural work of cultural institutions.

The presidents and directors of these various cultural institutions would argue that there's a simple economic answer: that jobs in sectors that employ people coming out of school with degrees in the arts/humanities are not the kinds of places that have all that much money to throw around in the first place: museums, libraries, schools, publishing houses, universities, etc. compared to a bank or General Motors or Enron. And while I see that yes obviously, most of these places can't afford to pay all of their employees six figures and stay in business, this explanation does not account for why a bureaucrat's starting salary at a large public university would be 50,000 dollars a year with full health benefits while an adjunct at that same university would be getting 2,500 per back-breaking section (that means you have to teach eight sections a year to make 20k before taxes, and that's without health benefits). It doesn't explain why an editorial assistant at a corporate publishing house makes a starting salary of 25,ooo dollars (living in New York City, no less!) while an entry-level job in the marketing department of that same corporation starts at 50-60k. These institutions with humanistic values would have you forgo health insurance and pay its board members 200k (and that's a low ball figure) for the most minor functions of being a board member. It's insulting. These situations are really instructive in showing us what our values are as a culture. Do we value culture, even in its most utilitarian form–education? No, we do not.

The utter monetary devaluation of cultural work is happening concurrently with changes in American class structure. A defining characteristic of American society, one which is deeply ingrained in the American psyche, is the idea that with hard work anyone can be upwardly mobile. But wages have actually stagnated since the 1970's. You're more likely now than at any time during the 20th century to be born and die in the same class, which additionally sucks because the underclass is growing and getting poorer. A college degree used to be the gateway to being economically middle-class but more and more, a college degree is a gateway to being culturally middle-class, but not economically middle-class because students graduate with such enormous amounts of student loan and credit card debt and go into careers which often don't offer much to help relieve this debt. This kind of semi-poverty is a terrible irony.

Too Objectivist for the Feminists, Too Feminist for the Objectivists

RBDP always knows what the fuck she's talking about. Even if you (or I sometimes) disagree.

Laughing at Bad Art, the Critical Introduction

When I posted my previous rant, a friend asked me why contemporary art was not on the list of irrelevant art forms. The reasons why visual are was not included in my original post and why it truly deserves its own post is that: visual art is still widely considered a powerful medium for communication, even by people who happen to not be artists (as opposed to say poetry, which no one besides other poets reads or cares about). But let's not confuse relevancy here with quality (because although, no one besides poets reads poetry, some of this writing is good, some astoundingly good, even). The gap between the amount of contemporary art being produced in the world and the quality of this art is quite large. Sometimes when you walk into a gallery, you have to get all Clement Greenberg on a bitch and ask, "Is this piece giving me any aesthetic pleasure?" Most of the time the answer will be "No, this piece is feebly attempting to incite some thought in me which its own maker doesn't even seem to grasp; this piece is brimming with historical references yet oddly ahistorical; this piece is collapsing under the weight of ideology; this piece is histrionic yet emotionally vacant." What's worse, the critical apparatus of art history and art criticism has been so absorbed and integrated into the art-making process that traditional critique is rendered moot. Today's bad art is like anti-biotic resistant staph infections–it knows the medicine you will level against it all too well. So what modes of criticism are left to de-fang this thing that passes for official visual culture in our galleries and museums? Laughter. Go forth and laugh at Bad Art. From your gut.