[Another excerpt from The Age of Aesthetics].
Horkheimer and Adorno, writing at the time of Fordist mass production, scorn the very notion of consumer choice: “That the difference between the models of Chrysler and General Motors is fundamentally illusory is known by every child, who is fascinated by that very difference.” Variations, in the form of distinctive individual traits, are “serially produced like the Yale locks which differ by fractions of a millimeter.” Such trivial differences “serve only to perpetuate the appearance of competition and choice”; beneath them, we find an “insatiable uniformity,” a “unified standard of value” for an entirely managed and rationalized culture.
Has any of this changed in the post-Fordist economy of flexible accumulation and niche marketing? Naomi Klein thinks not. Though transnational corporations today often give lip service to the ideals of multiplicity and variety, and especially ethnic diversity (as in the “united colors of Benetton” advertising campaigns), in reality “market-driven globalization doesn’t want diversity. . . Its enemies are national habits, local brands, and distinctive regional tastes.” We face “the strange combination of a sea of product coupled with losses in real choice.” Things are even more homogenized in the age of Starbucks and McDonald’s than they were in the age of Chrysler and General Motors. Multinational corporations that “promised a new age of freedom and diversity” in fact deliver endlessly repeated stereotypes. Each particular retail brand (like Starbucks, Ikea, or the Gap) has its own “distinctive quality,” as a point of identification for the consumer. But these one-dimensional distinctions in fact only serve the consolidation of corporate brand images, and the replacement of local, independent retail establishments by standardized multinational chains.
The problem with this line of argument is that it fails to address the question of why corporations should need to dissimulate in the first place. Why do they seek to maintain “the appearance of competition and choice,” even as they monopolize production and distribution, and abolish choice? Why do they pay lip service to “freedom and diversity,” if their actual goal is to suppress them? Why does Benetton advertise multiculturalism? Why does Apple stand for “think[ing] different,” and Starbucks for a warm, inclusive cosmopolitanism? It doesn’t seem adequate to say that these stances are nothing but lies and propaganda, designed to appease popular discontent, and to cover up what Horkheimer and Adorno call “the withering of imagination and spontaneity in the consumer of culture today.”
Slavoj Zizek, with his usual penchant for provocative inversions, argues that corporations really do promote diversity and choice – and that this is precisely the problem with them. For Zizek, “today’s capitalism already overcame the logic of totalizing normality and adopted the logic of the erratic excess.” For “the impersonal circulation of affects bypassing persons,” celebrated by such thinkers as Deleuze, is “the very logic of publicity, of video clips, and so forth in which what matters is not the message about the product but the intensity of the transmitted affects and perceptions.” Any appeal to diversity and multiplicity therefore ends up replicating the logic of Capital. Zĭzek even has the malice to suggest that Deleuze is the ultimate “ideologist of late capitalism,” and that Klein’s polemic against homogeneity would in fact “be applauded by contemporary capitalist modernizers. . . Is not the latest trend in corporate management itself ‘diversify, devolve power, try to mobilize local creativity and self-organization’ ? Is not anticentralization the topic of the ‘new’ digitalized capitalism?”
There is a genuine Kantian Antinomy at work here. We are faced with two incompatible propositions regarding the nature of Capital. “Each of them not only is in itself without contradiction, but even encounters conditions of its necessity in the nature of reason – except that, unfortunately, the counterproposition has on its side equally valid and necessary bases for its assertion” (Kant 1996, 454). Both propositions are simultaneously valid, and we can only shuttle back and forth between them, continually shifting perspective. The Kantian “solution” to such an Antinomy consists in grasping the way that both sides of the argument are equally right, and equally wrong – but each in a more limited way than might originally seem to be the case. We cannot move forward, and establish a dialectical synthesis between the two propositions (such would be the Hegelian move that Kant anticipates, and rejects in advance). Rather, we need to step back, and reflexively examine the presuppositions of the conflicting arguments.
The Antinomy of consumer choice is this. On the one hand, postmodern capitalism limits, and even abolishes, choice, in the interest of monopolistic accumulation. On the other hand, postmodern capitalism increases and proliferates choice, in order to saturate the market, and thereby both expand it and capture more of it. The “solution” to the Antinomy can therefore be stated as follows. Postmodern capitalism does indeed expand the range of choices we can make; but it does this by channeling choice exclusively, and restrictively, into the realm of commodity consumption. Zizek is right to argue that capitalism today is all about diversity and choice, and that the multiculturalist celebration of difference fits perfectly into its agenda. But he is wrong to condemn Deleuze as an “ideologist” of this process. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari offer a powerful critical analysis of late capitalism’s flows and “axiomatics” – something that Zĭzek himself conspicuously fails ever to do. For her part, Klein is right to insist that, in the regime of transnational corporations, with their ubiquitous logos and brand names, “options for unbranded alternatives, for open debate, criticism, and uncensored art – for real choice – are facing new and ominous restrictions” (131). But she is wrong to seize upon “real choice” as the alternative to capitalist domination; for “choice” itself is a term that only makes sense in the context of shopping, of individuals “limiting [their] expressions of freedom to acts of consumption.”
[This needs to be followed by an explanation of how “choice” really means “shopping,” as it comes down to selecting options from a “menu”, as the “rational choice” and “free market” ideologues like to call it; so that “choice” is not an adequate synonym for concrete freedom. Tim from The Wrong Side of Capitalism is right on point here, with his absolutely brilliant discussion of Girls Aloud vs. Sex in the City.]
[And, getting back to the Antinomy of Consumer Choice, the limitation that the arguments on both sides share is that they are all alike grounded in “cultural Marxism,” meaning that they are all more concerned with the logic of subjectivity than with the (more orthodoxly Marxist) logic of capital accumulation. I want to argue that this is an error, or a wrong turning. Horkheimer and Adorno focus on the administered society, on standardization and control — though they would probably acknowledge that this is ultimately a consequence of the drive for the accumulation of capital, this drive itself does not really attract their attention. On the other side, Zizek’s explanations of politics always focus upon “surplus enjoyment” rather than upon “surplus value”; though he concedes (in The Sublime Object of Ideology) that Lacan in fact derived the former concept from Marx’s formulation of the latter, he nonetheless ultimately privileges surplus enjoyment, the obscene superego supplement, etc. There’s a symmetry between Horkheimer/Adorno and Zizek, in that both focus on the psychoanalytic/psychosocial dimension — even if the former express it in terms of standardization, repression, and instrumental reason, while the latter expresses it in the form of excess, jouissance, and fantasy. Part of my overall argument in The Age of Aesthetics is that even, or especially, the “cultural turn” of today’s “late” (postmodern) capitalism needs to be understood in terms of capital logic, rather than through such psychosocial categories. This is not a foundationalist, or base/superstructure argument, but one closer both to Karatani’s understanding of Capital as a Kantian transcendental category for the social world today, and to Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence on the primacy (and the positivity) of social flows and investments.]
[Another excerpt from The Age of Aesthetics].
Horkheimer and Adorno, writing at the time of Fordist mass production, scorn the very notion of consumer choice: “That the difference between the models of Chrysler and General Motors is fundamentally illusory is known by every child, who is fascinated by that very difference.” Variations, in the form of distinctive individual traits, are “serially produced like the Yale locks which differ by fractions of a millimeter.” Such trivial differences “serve only to perpetuate the appearance of competition and choice”; beneath them, we find an “insatiable uniformity,” a “unified standard of value” for an entirely managed and rationalized culture.
Has any of this changed in the post-Fordist economy of flexible accumulation and niche marketing? Naomi Klein thinks not. Though transnational corporations today often give lip service to the ideals of multiplicity and variety, and especially ethnic diversity (as in the “united colors of Benetton” advertising campaigns), in reality “market-driven globalization doesn’t want diversity. . . Its enemies are national habits, local brands, and distinctive regional tastes.” We face “the strange combination of a sea of product coupled with losses in real choice.” Things are even more homogenized in the age of Starbucks and McDonald’s than they were in the age of Chrysler and General Motors. Multinational corporations that “promised a new age of freedom and diversity” in fact deliver endlessly repeated stereotypes. Each particular retail brand (like Starbucks, Ikea, or the Gap) has its own “distinctive quality,” as a point of identification for the consumer. But these one-dimensional distinctions in fact only serve the consolidation of corporate brand images, and the replacement of local, independent retail establishments by standardized multinational chains.
The problem with this line of argument is that it fails to address the question of why corporations should need to dissimulate in the first place. Why do they seek to maintain “the appearance of competition and choice,” even as they monopolize production and distribution, and abolish choice? Why do they pay lip service to “freedom and diversity,” if their actual goal is to suppress them? Why does Benetton advertise multiculturalism? Why does Apple stand for “think[ing] different,” and Starbucks for a warm, inclusive cosmopolitanism? It doesn’t seem adequate to say that these stances are nothing but lies and propaganda, designed to appease popular discontent, and to cover up what Horkheimer and Adorno call “the withering of imagination and spontaneity in the consumer of culture today.”
Slavoj Zizek, with his usual penchant for provocative inversions, argues that corporations really do promote diversity and choice – and that this is precisely the problem with them. For Zizek, “today’s capitalism already overcame the logic of totalizing normality and adopted the logic of the erratic excess.” For “the impersonal circulation of affects bypassing persons,” celebrated by such thinkers as Deleuze, is “the very logic of publicity, of video clips, and so forth in which what matters is not the message about the product but the intensity of the transmitted affects and perceptions.” Any appeal to diversity and multiplicity therefore ends up replicating the logic of Capital. Zĭzek even has the malice to suggest that Deleuze is the ultimate “ideologist of late capitalism,” and that Klein’s polemic against homogeneity would in fact “be applauded by contemporary capitalist modernizers. . . Is not the latest trend in corporate management itself ‘diversify, devolve power, try to mobilize local creativity and self-organization’ ? Is not anticentralization the topic of the ‘new’ digitalized capitalism?”
There is a genuine Kantian Antinomy at work here. We are faced with two incompatible propositions regarding the nature of Capital. “Each of them not only is in itself without contradiction, but even encounters conditions of its necessity in the nature of reason – except that, unfortunately, the counterproposition has on its side equally valid and necessary bases for its assertion” (Kant 1996, 454). Both propositions are simultaneously valid, and we can only shuttle back and forth between them, continually shifting perspective. The Kantian “solution” to such an Antinomy consists in grasping the way that both sides of the argument are equally right, and equally wrong – but each in a more limited way than might originally seem to be the case. We cannot move forward, and establish a dialectical synthesis between the two propositions (such would be the Hegelian move that Kant anticipates, and rejects in advance). Rather, we need to step back, and reflexively examine the presuppositions of the conflicting arguments.
The Antinomy of consumer choice is this. On the one hand, postmodern capitalism limits, and even abolishes, choice, in the interest of monopolistic accumulation. On the other hand, postmodern capitalism increases and proliferates choice, in order to saturate the market, and thereby both expand it and capture more of it. The “solution” to the Antinomy can therefore be stated as follows. Postmodern capitalism does indeed expand the range of choices we can make; but it does this by channeling choice exclusively, and restrictively, into the realm of commodity consumption. Zizek is right to argue that capitalism today is all about diversity and choice, and that the multiculturalist celebration of difference fits perfectly into its agenda. But he is wrong to condemn Deleuze as an “ideologist” of this process. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari offer a powerful critical analysis of late capitalism’s flows and “axiomatics” – something that Zĭzek himself conspicuously fails ever to do. For her part, Klein is right to insist that, in the regime of transnational corporations, with their ubiquitous logos and brand names, “options for unbranded alternatives, for open debate, criticism, and uncensored art – for real choice – are facing new and ominous restrictions” (131). But she is wrong to seize upon “real choice” as the alternative to capitalist domination; for “choice” itself is a term that only makes sense in the context of shopping, of individuals “limiting [their] expressions of freedom to acts of consumption.”
[This needs to be followed by an explanation of how “choice” really means “shopping,” as it comes down to selecting options from a “menu”, as the “rational choice” and “free market” ideologues like to call it; so that “choice” is not an adequate synonym for concrete freedom. Tim from The Wrong Side of Capitalism is right on point here, with his absolutely brilliant discussion of Girls Aloud vs. Sex in the City.]
[And, getting back to the Antinomy of Consumer Choice, the limitation that the arguments on both sides share is that they are all alike grounded in “cultural Marxism,” meaning that they are all more concerned with the logic of subjectivity than with the (more orthodoxly Marxist) logic of capital accumulation. I want to argue that this is an error, or a wrong turning. Horkheimer and Adorno focus on the administered society, on standardization and control — though they would probably acknowledge that this is ultimately a consequence of the drive for the accumulation of capital, this drive itself does not really attract their attention. On the other side, Zizek’s explanations of politics always focus upon “surplus enjoyment” rather than upon “surplus value”; though he concedes (in The Sublime Object of Ideology) that Lacan in fact derived the former concept from Marx’s formulation of the latter, he nonetheless ultimately privileges surplus enjoyment, the obscene superego supplement, etc. There’s a symmetry between Horkheimer/Adorno and Zizek, in that both focus on the psychoanalytic/psychosocial dimension — even if the former express it in terms of standardization, repression, and instrumental reason, while the latter expresses it in the form of excess, jouissance, and fantasy. Part of my overall argument in The Age of Aesthetics is that even, or especially, the “cultural turn” of today’s “late” (postmodern) capitalism needs to be understood in terms of capital logic, rather than through such psychosocial categories. This is not a foundationalist, or base/superstructure argument, but one closer both to Karatani’s understanding of Capital as a Kantian transcendental category for the social world today, and to Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence on the primacy (and the positivity) of social flows and investments.]
I’ve now seen two of Kim Ki-Duk‘s films — 3-Iron and The Isle — and they are both so astonishing that I want to see everything he’s made. Kim’s films are not like those of any other Korean director I’ve encountered. They are visually beautiful: quite static, with a precision of framing and crispness of editing that prevents them from being merely picturesque or postcard-pretty. They are very slow-moving and contemplative, but they also feel compressed and concise: a paradox I can’t explain except to say that, while little overtly happens, and more action is inferred than actually shown, there is no sense of lingering, and Kim eschews that sort of extended temporality that we get in the works of directors as diverse as Ozu, Tarkovsky, and Antonioni (with all of whom Kim might otherwise be compared in terms of composition and pace). Kim’s films do have their moments of violence, when everything comes to a head in a single movement; this would seem to contradict, but actually makes a powerful synthesis with, their stillness. (Nothing too explicit in 3-Iron, although it has its troubling violent moments; but The Isle contains, among other things, two extremely visceral scenes of self-mutilation, which, while not quite as explicitly presented as the violent scenes in, say, Tarantino or Miike, are far more disturbing, because of their emotional intensity, and because we can’t dismiss them as being over-the-top to the point of absurdity). In both films, there is very little dialogue; and in both, the main character does not speak at all. Both films are tales of extreme sexual passion, indeed of passion pushed to a point of transcendent craziness; yet at the same time this passion does not take the (by now all too familiar) form of amour fou, but instead seems reined in by an odd kind of restraint (fairly gentle in 3-Iron, and all the more extreme for being so unexpressive in The Isle). This passion is both otherworldly, and yet too carnal to be called “spiritual” (at least in whatever Western terms I am able to understand). And the passion occurs between two protagonists, moves from one of them to the other, in a way that cannot be reduced either to one-sided erotic obsession (like Vertigo) on the one hand, or folie à deux on the other. Both films are organized around the encounter of a heterosexual couple, in which one of the partners transforms (it would be too crude to say “liberates”) the other: in 3-Iron it is the man who inspires and changes the woman, while in The Isle it is the woman who moves and changes the man. I can’t say much more without going into plot detail about the two films, and obviously I need to see more of Kim’s films before I generalize further as to what he is about. But 3-Iron and The Isle are beautiful in their intensity, and both of them convey something I have never encountered before in film (and only rarely in writing): what I can only call (for want of any better phrase to describe it) trans-subjective affect in motion, on a level that can only be shown, not explicitly said or conventionally expressed.
I’ve now seen two of Kim Ki-Duk‘s films — 3-Iron and The Isle — and they are both so astonishing that I want to see everything he’s made. Kim’s films are not like those of any other Korean director I’ve encountered. They are visually beautiful: quite static, with a precision of framing and crispness of editing that prevents them from being merely picturesque or postcard-pretty. They are very slow-moving and contemplative, but they also feel compressed and concise: a paradox I can’t explain except to say that, while little overtly happens, and more action is inferred than actually shown, there is no sense of lingering, and Kim eschews that sort of extended temporality that we get in the works of directors as diverse as Ozu, Tarkovsky, and Antonioni (with all of whom Kim might otherwise be compared in terms of composition and pace). Kim’s films do have their moments of violence, when everything comes to a head in a single movement; this would seem to contradict, but actually makes a powerful synthesis with, their stillness. (Nothing too explicit in 3-Iron, although it has its troubling violent moments; but The Isle contains, among other things, two extremely visceral scenes of self-mutilation, which, while not quite as explicitly presented as the violent scenes in, say, Tarantino or Miike, are far more disturbing, because of their emotional intensity, and because we can’t dismiss them as being over-the-top to the point of absurdity). In both films, there is very little dialogue; and in both, the main character does not speak at all. Both films are tales of extreme sexual passion, indeed of passion pushed to a point of transcendent craziness; yet at the same time this passion does not take the (by now all too familiar) form of amour fou, but instead seems reined in by an odd kind of restraint (fairly gentle in 3-Iron, and all the more extreme for being so unexpressive in The Isle). This passion is both otherworldly, and yet too carnal to be called “spiritual” (at least in whatever Western terms I am able to understand). And the passion occurs between two protagonists, moves from one of them to the other, in a way that cannot be reduced either to one-sided erotic obsession (like Vertigo) on the one hand, or folie à deux on the other. Both films are organized around the encounter of a heterosexual couple, in which one of the partners transforms (it would be too crude to say “liberates”) the other: in 3-Iron it is the man who inspires and changes the woman, while in The Isle it is the woman who moves and changes the man. I can’t say much more without going into plot detail about the two films, and obviously I need to see more of Kim’s films before I generalize further as to what he is about. But 3-Iron and The Isle are beautiful in their intensity, and both of them convey something I have never encountered before in film (and only rarely in writing): what I can only call (for want of any better phrase to describe it) trans-subjective affect in motion, on a level that can only be shown, not explicitly said or conventionally expressed.
The Pop Music Conference at the Experience Music Project in Seattle is one of the best conferences I have ever been to — I’ve gone for three of the four yearly conferences so far. It’s great because you get a whole group of people who are really passionate about talking and thinking about popular music, and because the mixture of academics and music journalists leads to talks and discussions that are far more interesting than you would get from either group alone.
The theme for next year’s conference is: “”Ain’t That a Shame”: Loving Music in the Shadow of Doubt.” (You can read the details of the Call For Papers on the site). Anyway, here’s my 250-word proposal for the conference (I don’t think I will hear whether or not I’ve been accepted until February or so):
What Will the Neighbors Say?: Girls Aloud, the Blogosphere, and Me
My most embarrassing musical enthusiasm is undoubtedly my passion for Girls Aloud. This is not just because the Girls embody “sexy” female stereotypes so tiredly stereotypical that it’s hard to imagine anyone over the age of 12 lusting after or identifying with them; nor even because the group was created on a reality TV show so crass as to make American Idol seem positively authentic in comparison. But also because Girls Aloud, although a bit hit in the UK, have not been marketed or released in the US, which means that my American fan appreciation of them is entirely mediated through the Web. I have little real sense of the cultural and media context in which Girls Aloud operate. While I think their music is great on purely pop-formalist grounds, I remain unable to place them as cultural icons. Girls Aloud are sufficiently bizarre and extreme, at least in the displaced way I apprehend them, that they seem not to take one obvious side in the old pop vs. authenticity debate, but to displace the terms of dispute altogether. I remain suspended between the various bloggers’ estimations of them I have read, ranging from Tim of The Wrong Side of Capitalism, who asserts that “Girls Aloud create a genuine crack in bourgeois ideology,” to Simon Reynolds in his blissblog, who sneers that “even their most passionate and unstintingly analytical fans cannot distinguish between the girls’ voices on record (although some seem to be able to tell them apart okay as fantasy fuckmates).” My talk is an attempt to work through these confusions.
The Pop Music Conference at the Experience Music Project in Seattle is one of the best conferences I have ever been to — I’ve gone for three of the four yearly conferences so far. It’s great because you get a whole group of people who are really passionate about talking and thinking about popular music, and because the mixture of academics and music journalists leads to talks and discussions that are far more interesting than you would get from either group alone.
The theme for next year’s conference is: “”Ain’t That a Shame”: Loving Music in the Shadow of Doubt.” (You can read the details of the Call For Papers on the site). Anyway, here’s my 250-word proposal for the conference (I don’t think I will hear whether or not I’ve been accepted until February or so):
What Will the Neighbors Say?: Girls Aloud, the Blogosphere, and Me
My most embarrassing musical enthusiasm is undoubtedly my passion for Girls Aloud. This is not just because the Girls embody “sexy” female stereotypes so tiredly stereotypical that it’s hard to imagine anyone over the age of 12 lusting after or identifying with them; nor even because the group was created on a reality TV show so crass as to make American Idol seem positively authentic in comparison. But also because Girls Aloud, although a bit hit in the UK, have not been marketed or released in the US, which means that my American fan appreciation of them is entirely mediated through the Web. I have little real sense of the cultural and media context in which Girls Aloud operate. While I think their music is great on purely pop-formalist grounds, I remain unable to place them as cultural icons. Girls Aloud are sufficiently bizarre and extreme, at least in the displaced way I apprehend them, that they seem not to take one obvious side in the old pop vs. authenticity debate, but to displace the terms of dispute altogether. I remain suspended between the various bloggers’ estimations of them I have read, ranging from Tim of The Wrong Side of Capitalism, who asserts that “Girls Aloud create a genuine crack in bourgeois ideology,” to Simon Reynolds in his blissblog, who sneers that “even their most passionate and unstintingly analytical fans cannot distinguish between the girls’ voices on record (although some seem to be able to tell them apart okay as fantasy fuckmates).” My talk is an attempt to work through these confusions.
So here’s my top ten albums list for 2005. Usual caveats apply (there are lots of things I haven’t heard that I well might like if I did; I can’t always remember if something came out this past year or earlier; I might well feel differently tomorrow than I do today; etc.).
- M.I.A., Arular. After all the controversy, still the best beats of the year.
- Kevin Blechdom, Eat My Heart Out, which I just wrote about yesterday.
- Petra Haden Sings The Who Sell Out. Unearthly.
- Missy Elliott, The Cookbook. Missy in her commercially-calculated, humdrum, unambitious middling range (as I said here) is still superior to most rappers at their best.
- R. Kelly, Trapped in the Closet 1-12. I know the songs weren’t released together as an album — though they were as a DVD — but this musically minimal melodrama is so ridiculously over-the-top and go-for-broke crazy, how can I not love it?
- Lady Sovereign, Vertically Challenged. I adore the S-O-V and her demented, tough, and smart-alecky ways. So I have to list this EP, even though the versions of the songs, in this her first American release, are inferior to the UK versions I originally downloaded as mp3s (not to mention that some of her best stuff, like “Sad-Ass Strippah,” probably the most brilliant and vicious diss ever recorded, is not included here).
- Fannypack, See You Next Thursday. I can’t understand why this group isn’t more popular. I find their Miami-bass-goes-Brooklyn (with a touch of ESG down from the Bronx) synthesized music, and their sassy, cartoonish, jail-bait girl vocalists, irresistible.
- Vex’d, Degenerate. It’s strange channeling these new London sounds — grime and dubstep, though I know there are also other names — entirely through the blogosphere, without access to the scene in any more direct way. In any case, I find these doom-laden instrumentals quite haunting. (Doom-laden isn’t quite the right word, since “doom” implies finality, but the sense that there could be an end is precisely what this dark music denies us).
- Four Tet, Everything Ecstatic. Quite different in feel from his previous album — this one is more propulsive, less (seemingly) “organic” — but none of the other electronic-music-without-vocals that I’ve heard this year is anywhere near as metamorphic and light- and open-sounding (not to use the obvious cue of the title and say, ecstatic).
- Miranda Lambert, Kerosene. I don’t listen much to country, and basically I don’t get country at all, but nonetheless I find a lot of this oddly compelling.
So here’s my top ten albums list for 2005. Usual caveats apply (there are lots of things I haven’t heard that I well might like if I did; I can’t always remember if something came out this past year or earlier; I might well feel differently tomorrow than I do today; etc.).
- M.I.A., Arular. After all the controversy, still the best beats of the year.
- Kevin Blechdom, Eat My Heart Out, which I just wrote about yesterday.
- Petra Haden Sings The Who Sell Out. Unearthly.
- Missy Elliott, The Cookbook. Missy in her commercially-calculated, humdrum, unambitious middling range (as I said here) is still superior to most rappers at their best.
- R. Kelly, Trapped in the Closet 1-12. I know the songs weren’t released together as an album — though they were as a DVD — but this musically minimal melodrama is so ridiculously over-the-top and go-for-broke crazy, how can I not love it?
- Lady Sovereign, Vertically Challenged. I adore the S-O-V and her demented, tough, and smart-alecky ways. So I have to list this EP, even though the versions of the songs, in this her first American release, are inferior to the UK versions I originally downloaded as mp3s (not to mention that some of her best stuff, like “Sad-Ass Strippah,” probably the most brilliant and vicious diss ever recorded, is not included here).
- Fannypack, See You Next Thursday. I can’t understand why this group isn’t more popular. I find their Miami-bass-goes-Brooklyn (with a touch of ESG down from the Bronx) synthesized music, and their sassy, cartoonish, jail-bait girl vocalists, irresistible.
- Vex’d, Degenerate. It’s strange channeling these new London sounds — grime and dubstep, though I know there are also other names — entirely through the blogosphere, without access to the scene in any more direct way. In any case, I find these doom-laden instrumentals quite haunting. (Doom-laden isn’t quite the right word, since “doom” implies finality, but the sense that there could be an end is precisely what this dark music denies us).
- Four Tet, Everything Ecstatic. Quite different in feel from his previous album — this one is more propulsive, less (seemingly) “organic” — but none of the other electronic-music-without-vocals that I’ve heard this year is anywhere near as metamorphic and light- and open-sounding (not to use the obvious cue of the title and say, ecstatic).
- Miranda Lambert, Kerosene. I don’t listen much to country, and basically I don’t get country at all, but nonetheless I find a lot of this oddly compelling.
I’ve been listening a lot to — OK, I’ve developed a minor obsession with — Kevin Blechdom‘s album Eat My Heart Out (iTunes) (you can also buy un-DRMed mp3s of the album from Bleep).
The songs in Eat My Heart Out seem to tell the story of an unhappy love affair: they are about being in love, trying to get over a disappointed love, being dumped and not being able to stand it, hating the person you love because he dumped you, wanting revenge, pleading to be taken back, resolving to forget him and get on with your life, not being able to forget him and get on with your life, reveling in abjection, rejecting abjection and finding strength in yourself, realizing that he wasn’t worthy of you, and so on, and so on — only in no particular narrative order. There are 19 songs in 39 minutes; individual songs range in length from 0:19 to 3:19. It feels like they just come pouring out, breathlessly, one after another, in manic, hysterical confusion. Most of the songs are fast, though a few are slow; some are harshly dissonant, but most of them sound harmonically and melodically familiar, as if turns of melody everybody knows, cliches of pop music, in great variety, have come pouring out, only somewhat distorted, and also carnivalesque, as if they had been filtered through an alien consciousness that didn’t quite “get” human emotions. Or perhaps a better description would be that it’s like children’s music from Hell, pounding away on a toy piano (though I think the instrumentation is actually all or mostly electronic) — but anyway, the music is perversely upbeat and cheerful even as it is recounting nightmares, there are these simple little bouncy, dancelike refrains cycling over and over, layer over layer, except that often the music changes tack radically in mid-song. There’s also something a bit childlike, or perhaps better naive, about Kevin’s voice, I mean naive in the way she modulates from one passion to another without any sort of transition or attempt at plausibility in the shifts, sort of like she’s singing an opera (or a movie soundtrack) whose arias are all melodramatic, and out of proportion with the feelings they recount, with heartfelt choruses and everything, but not logically connected in any way. One moment she’s sounds like she’s hyperventilating, screaming/crying, “I love you from the heart, so fuck you!!”; the next she sounds like she is gleefully reciting some twisted nursery rhyme. The effect is that of something almost naked in its intensity, and yet something totally theatrical and made up, at the same time; crediting the album with either sincerity or irony — or trying to distinguish between the two — would seem to be utterly beside the point. The rush from one song, one mood, to the next, is so frantic, and so unmediated, that it is almost as if all the attitudes, all the affects, all the possibilities, all the stages of a failed relationship, somehow coexisted simultaneously. I’ve often written about how the theatricality of melodrama makes emotions seem “real” precisely because they are distanced by being placed “in quotation marks.” I don’t quite know how to formulate this, but Eat My Heart Out seems to me like the exact inverse of melodrama, as if all its emotions seem formally patterned and aesthetically distanced, a detached and cynical game of some sort, precisely because they are so raw and immediate at the same time. If that makes any sense at all? This music is doing very strange things to my head, and I can’t stop listening to it.
I’ve been listening a lot to — OK, I’ve developed a minor obsession with — Kevin Blechdom‘s album Eat My Heart Out (iTunes) (you can also buy un-DRMed mp3s of the album from Bleep).
The songs in Eat My Heart Out seem to tell the story of an unhappy love affair: they are about being in love, trying to get over a disappointed love, being dumped and not being able to stand it, hating the person you love because he dumped you, wanting revenge, pleading to be taken back, resolving to forget him and get on with your life, not being able to forget him and get on with your life, reveling in abjection, rejecting abjection and finding strength in yourself, realizing that he wasn’t worthy of you, and so on, and so on — only in no particular narrative order. There are 19 songs in 39 minutes; individual songs range in length from 0:19 to 3:19. It feels like they just come pouring out, breathlessly, one after another, in manic, hysterical confusion. Most of the songs are fast, though a few are slow; some are harshly dissonant, but most of them sound harmonically and melodically familiar, as if turns of melody everybody knows, cliches of pop music, in great variety, have come pouring out, only somewhat distorted, and also carnivalesque, as if they had been filtered through an alien consciousness that didn’t quite “get” human emotions. Or perhaps a better description would be that it’s like children’s music from Hell, pounding away on a toy piano (though I think the instrumentation is actually all or mostly electronic) — but anyway, the music is perversely upbeat and cheerful even as it is recounting nightmares, there are these simple little bouncy, dancelike refrains cycling over and over, layer over layer, except that often the music changes tack radically in mid-song. There’s also something a bit childlike, or perhaps better naive, about Kevin’s voice, I mean naive in the way she modulates from one passion to another without any sort of transition or attempt at plausibility in the shifts, sort of like she’s singing an opera (or a movie soundtrack) whose arias are all melodramatic, and out of proportion with the feelings they recount, with heartfelt choruses and everything, but not logically connected in any way. One moment she’s sounds like she’s hyperventilating, screaming/crying, “I love you from the heart, so fuck you!!”; the next she sounds like she is gleefully reciting some twisted nursery rhyme. The effect is that of something almost naked in its intensity, and yet something totally theatrical and made up, at the same time; crediting the album with either sincerity or irony — or trying to distinguish between the two — would seem to be utterly beside the point. The rush from one song, one mood, to the next, is so frantic, and so unmediated, that it is almost as if all the attitudes, all the affects, all the possibilities, all the stages of a failed relationship, somehow coexisted simultaneously. I’ve often written about how the theatricality of melodrama makes emotions seem “real” precisely because they are distanced by being placed “in quotation marks.” I don’t quite know how to formulate this, but Eat My Heart Out seems to me like the exact inverse of melodrama, as if all its emotions seem formally patterned and aesthetically distanced, a detached and cynical game of some sort, precisely because they are so raw and immediate at the same time. If that makes any sense at all? This music is doing very strange things to my head, and I can’t stop listening to it.
Alex Cox‘s most recently completed film is I’m a Juvenile Delinquent — Jail Me!, a short (about 40 minutes) made for the BBC, on which it was shown, amazingly, as a children’s show. The DVD is available for purchase direct from Cox’s website.
I’m a Juvenile Delinquent — Jail Me! is a sardonic little parable about the rise and fall of a “reality show” in which a bunch of juveniles commit crimes (vandalism, robbery, etc) on camera. We move outward from the show itself, to the people creating the show, to “on-the-street” interviews with viewers, to the larger forces (media, police, government, etc.) that determine the show’s success and faillure. The show’s hosts/presenters/producers are a pair of obnoxious frat-boy types (or whatever the British equivalent is); they exploit the kids featured in the program, but get into trouble themselves over questions of the show’s “morality,” until they come up with the brilliant, “competitive” solution of a final episode in which four of the show’s five juvenile delinquents are sent to jail, while the fifth one gets a shot at pop stardom. And it spirals out from there, to involve the entire British pomp-and-circumstance class structure, with rapacious American corporations waiting in the wings.
What’s really brilliant about I’m a Juvenile Delinquent — Jail Me! is the way that the entire film (and not just the show-within-the-film) is shot in a trash-TV exploitative style, with lots of closeups, wobbly cameras, quick transitions, cheapo digital effects, bits from blurry surveillance footage, etc. There is no distinction between the “reality show” itself and the surrounding footage narrating its history. So we get the sense of how the entire society has become televisualized. Video is more real than anything else; it is conterminous with all of social space. And the critique of television — at one point there is even a scene of (the real) George Galloway denouncing the (fictional) reality show — is itself folded back into television. There is no moral high ground, and there is no Outside. A grim conclusion, but an all too accurate one.
Alex Cox‘s most recently completed film is I’m a Juvenile Delinquent — Jail Me!, a short (about 40 minutes) made for the BBC, on which it was shown, amazingly, as a children’s show. The DVD is available for purchase direct from Cox’s website.
I’m a Juvenile Delinquent — Jail Me! is a sardonic little parable about the rise and fall of a “reality show” in which a bunch of juveniles commit crimes (vandalism, robbery, etc) on camera. We move outward from the show itself, to the people creating the show, to “on-the-street” interviews with viewers, to the larger forces (media, police, government, etc.) that determine the show’s success and faillure. The show’s hosts/presenters/producers are a pair of obnoxious frat-boy types (or whatever the British equivalent is); they exploit the kids featured in the program, but get into trouble themselves over questions of the show’s “morality,” until they come up with the brilliant, “competitive” solution of a final episode in which four of the show’s five juvenile delinquents are sent to jail, while the fifth one gets a shot at pop stardom. And it spirals out from there, to involve the entire British pomp-and-circumstance class structure, with rapacious American corporations waiting in the wings.
What’s really brilliant about I’m a Juvenile Delinquent — Jail Me! is the way that the entire film (and not just the show-within-the-film) is shot in a trash-TV exploitative style, with lots of closeups, wobbly cameras, quick transitions, cheapo digital effects, bits from blurry surveillance footage, etc. There is no distinction between the “reality show” itself and the surrounding footage narrating its history. So we get the sense of how the entire society has become televisualized. Video is more real than anything else; it is conterminous with all of social space. And the critique of television — at one point there is even a scene of (the real) George Galloway denouncing the (fictional) reality show — is itself folded back into television. There is no moral high ground, and there is no Outside. A grim conclusion, but an all too accurate one.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Alex Cox is one of the best and most interesting — and also one of the most underappreciated and underrated — film directors currently working. I just saw his 1998 film Three Businessmen, which was quite wonderful (even if not quite reaching the sublime heights of Revengers Tragedy).
Three Businessmen is about two businessmen — a loud and vulgar, obnoxiously extroverted American (Miguel Sandoval) and a dour, depressive, introverted Brit (played by Cox himself) — who wander through (initially) Liverpool one night, looking for (and never quite finding) a meal. (The third businessman doesn’t show up until nearly the end). The movie mostly consists of their conversation (banter, argument, pontification, etc.) on subjects ranging from the virtues of different drinks, to the loyalty of dogs, to how the new electronic media are changing commerce. The cinematography is almost entirely long shots — though occasionally the camera tracks in towards the protagonists. The effect is mostly comic and absurdist, but in an extremely dry, distanced, and understated way. Subtle incongruities abound. At one early point, the protagonists are wandering through what is evidently a depressed, broken-down, impoverished neighborhood, when they suddenly stumble upon a large and brightly-lit Mercedes showroom. They go to a bar and ask about this. The woman behind the bar tells them that it’s for drug dealers. But they prefer to believe a fellow drinker who assures them that the city is being revitalized, thanks to miles and miles of fiber-optic cable, and the Mercedes showroom is due to the new business activity pouring in. As they continue to wander, things become stranger: every time our protagonists take public transportation (a bus, a subway, a ferry, a taxi, etc) they find themselves in a different world city (Rotterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc). Watching the film, it took me a while to realize how something was amiss (i.e. there couldn’t be that large a Japanese restaurant district in Liverpool…).
The film could be seen as an exploration of opposed, American vs. British, character types: a deconstruction of the cliches of both nationalities. But in addition, our protagonists — not corporate management types, but small, independent businessmen (both currently art dealers, but previously involved in real estate and other ventures) — are in fact wandering through the “space of flows” of postmodern, transnational finance capital: something that neither they, nor we the viewers, are entirely able to grasp or understand — it’s a space, as Fredric Jameson wrote, that can’t be “represented” in conventional ways, and needs a new form of “cognitive mapping.” Except that, at the very end of the movie — no, I won’t give this largely plotless film’s one plot twist away. I’ll just say that the film starts with the grandiose, faux-classical architecture of central Liverpool, a heritage from the 19th century, when Britain ruled the world, and the city was one of the world’s major ports and industrial centers — in sharp contrast to its present depressed squalor; and it ends in the deserts of Mexico, with a vague hope of redemption from the infernal cycles of capital…
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Alex Cox is one of the best and most interesting — and also one of the most underappreciated and underrated — film directors currently working. I just saw his 1998 film Three Businessmen, which was quite wonderful (even if not quite reaching the sublime heights of Revengers Tragedy).
Three Businessmen is about two businessmen — a loud and vulgar, obnoxiously extroverted American (Miguel Sandoval) and a dour, depressive, introverted Brit (played by Cox himself) — who wander through (initially) Liverpool one night, looking for (and never quite finding) a meal. (The third businessman doesn’t show up until nearly the end). The movie mostly consists of their conversation (banter, argument, pontification, etc.) on subjects ranging from the virtues of different drinks, to the loyalty of dogs, to how the new electronic media are changing commerce. The cinematography is almost entirely long shots — though occasionally the camera tracks in towards the protagonists. The effect is mostly comic and absurdist, but in an extremely dry, distanced, and understated way. Subtle incongruities abound. At one early point, the protagonists are wandering through what is evidently a depressed, broken-down, impoverished neighborhood, when they suddenly stumble upon a large and brightly-lit Mercedes showroom. They go to a bar and ask about this. The woman behind the bar tells them that it’s for drug dealers. But they prefer to believe a fellow drinker who assures them that the city is being revitalized, thanks to miles and miles of fiber-optic cable, and the Mercedes showroom is due to the new business activity pouring in. As they continue to wander, things become stranger: every time our protagonists take public transportation (a bus, a subway, a ferry, a taxi, etc) they find themselves in a different world city (Rotterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong, etc). Watching the film, it took me a while to realize how something was amiss (i.e. there couldn’t be that large a Japanese restaurant district in Liverpool…).
The film could be seen as an exploration of opposed, American vs. British, character types: a deconstruction of the cliches of both nationalities. But in addition, our protagonists — not corporate management types, but small, independent businessmen (both currently art dealers, but previously involved in real estate and other ventures) — are in fact wandering through the “space of flows” of postmodern, transnational finance capital: something that neither they, nor we the viewers, are entirely able to grasp or understand — it’s a space, as Fredric Jameson wrote, that can’t be “represented” in conventional ways, and needs a new form of “cognitive mapping.” Except that, at the very end of the movie — no, I won’t give this largely plotless film’s one plot twist away. I’ll just say that the film starts with the grandiose, faux-classical architecture of central Liverpool, a heritage from the 19th century, when Britain ruled the world, and the city was one of the world’s major ports and industrial centers — in sharp contrast to its present depressed squalor; and it ends in the deserts of Mexico, with a vague hope of redemption from the infernal cycles of capital…
Joe Dante’s Homecoming, shown tonight on Showtime as part of their current Masters of Horror series, is a great zombie B-movie, and a wonderful little bit of agitprop about the Iraq War. When a Cindy Sheehan-like mother of a soldier dead in the War asks what her son died for, a sanctimonious White House speechwriter responds that if he had one wish, it would be that her son could come back to tell her of the importance of the cause for which he gave his life. And the speechwriter gets his wish: all the soldiers dead in the war awaken as zombies… only they’ve come back, not to bless the President’s policies, but to vote him out of office. And though all the dead soldiers want is to express their opinions through the ballot box, the situation escalates after the President wins re-election by fixing the results in Ohio and Florida…
There’s not that much, really, to say about the movie. Homecoming doesn’t go for subtlety. It is tight, direct, on the mark, and well focused in all its details. There are some good zombie scenes, and I especially enjoyed the satirical sequences involving sleazy characters who are obvious analogues of Karl Rove and Ann Coulter. It’s great that a movie like this was able to get on the air (albeit only on premium cable). It’s an emotionally satisfying revenge fantasy, a neat reversal of the propaganda that we are usually fed about the war.
Joe Dante’s Homecoming, shown tonight on Showtime as part of their current Masters of Horror series, is a great zombie B-movie, and a wonderful little bit of agitprop about the Iraq War. When a Cindy Sheehan-like mother of a soldier dead in the War asks what her son died for, a sanctimonious White House speechwriter responds that if he had one wish, it would be that her son could come back to tell her of the importance of the cause for which he gave his life. And the speechwriter gets his wish: all the soldiers dead in the war awaken as zombies… only they’ve come back, not to bless the President’s policies, but to vote him out of office. And though all the dead soldiers want is to express their opinions through the ballot box, the situation escalates after the President wins re-election by fixing the results in Ohio and Florida…
There’s not that much, really, to say about the movie. Homecoming doesn’t go for subtlety. It is tight, direct, on the mark, and well focused in all its details. There are some good zombie scenes, and I especially enjoyed the satirical sequences involving sleazy characters who are obvious analogues of Karl Rove and Ann Coulter. It’s great that a movie like this was able to get on the air (albeit only on premium cable). It’s an emotionally satisfying revenge fantasy, a neat reversal of the propaganda that we are usually fed about the war.