Month: June 2003

The City in Mind

Reading James Howard Kunstler’s The City in Mind was a depressing experience. While I am inclined to agree with Kunstler’s main premise–his love for livable cities, and his dislike for suburbs and for development in which the automobile is favored at the expense of clustered living in which you can shop, go to work, and meet people in a local cafe, all within walking distance or easily accessible via quick public transportation–and to admire his vigorous and sometimes vituperative prose, I was also (perhaps contradictorily?) annoyed by his moralism, his snobbery, and his often dubious generalizations. The moralism and snobbery are evident in Kunstler’s utter disdain for Las Vegas; he writes as if the delirious simulations of Caesar’s Palace and the Bellagio and New York, New York were somehow an insult to the human spirit–it’s worse than reading Adorno’s denunciations of jazz. As for the dubious generalizations, I find many of Kunstler’s broad historical strokes–swooning over the enlightened despotism of Louis Napoleon, or blaming Aztec human sacrifices for the woes of Mexico City today, or celebrating contemporary gentrification as a way to renew inner cities–hard to take. At his best–denouncing the evils of modernist architecture, and praising the active street life of Paris–Kunstler pretty much just repeats arguments that were propounded more rigorously, as well as more generously, by Jane Jacobs. At his worst, he seems ignorant of how power and class work; he is all too ready to denounce the greed and stupidity of real estate developers (about which he will find no disagreement from me) but unable to grasp the systematic workings of economic exploitation and social exclusion in the modern and postmodern world.

Reading James Howard Kunstler‘s The City in Mind was a depressing experience. While I am inclined to agree with Kunstler’s main premise–his love for livable cities, and his dislike for suburbs and for development in which the automobile is favored at the expense of clustered living in which you can shop, go to work, and meet people in a local cafe, all within walking distance or easily accessible via quick public transportation–and to admire his vigorous and sometimes vituperative prose, I was also (perhaps contradictorily?) annoyed by his moralism, his snobbery, and his often dubious generalizations. The moralism and snobbery are evident in Kunstler’s utter disdain for Las Vegas; he writes as if the delirious simulations of Caesar’s Palace and the Bellagio and New York, New York were somehow an insult to the human spirit–it’s worse than reading Adorno’s denunciations of jazz. As for the dubious generalizations, I find many of Kunstler’s broad historical strokes–swooning over the enlightened despotism of Louis Napoleon, or blaming Aztec human sacrifices for the woes of Mexico City today, or celebrating contemporary gentrification as a way to renew inner cities–hard to take. At his best–denouncing the evils of modernist architecture, and praising the active street life of Paris–Kunstler pretty much just repeats arguments that were propounded more rigorously, as well as more generously, by Jane Jacobs. At his worst, he seems ignorant of how power and class work; he is all too ready to denounce the greed and stupidity of real estate developers (about which he will find no disagreement from me) but unable to grasp the systematic workings of economic exploitation and social exclusion in the modern and postmodern world.

Cry Woman

Liu Bingjian’s Cry Woman is a powerful, laconic and understated film about a woman who ekes out a living in the Chinese countryside as a professional mourner at funerals. This after she leaves Beijing, where she is hassled by the police, irritated by her good-for-nothing husband, foisted with the care of a child who is not her own, and finally forced to flee from creditors as well as from the consequences of her husband’s incarceration. The tone with which the film recounts all this is neither comic absurdism nor built-up pathos, but a kind of blank, elliptical observation. This seems to parallel the situation of the heroine herself, who must block out her own feelings of pain in order to be able to function at all, in order to just survive. It’s almost too perfect an irony that she earns her living by weeping and singing, for cash, at funerals–she can express other peoples’ pain, at the price of repressing her own. As the film progresses, it all gets to be too much; but the camera never falters. A beautiful and unusual film.

Liu Bingjian’s Cry Woman is a powerful, laconic and understated film about a woman who ekes out a living in the Chinese countryside as a professional mourner at funerals. This after she leaves Beijing, where she is hassled by the police, irritated by her good-for-nothing husband, foisted with the care of a child who is not her own, and finally forced to flee from creditors as well as from the consequences of her husband’s incarceration. The tone with which the film recounts all this is neither comic absurdism nor built-up pathos, but a kind of blank, elliptical observation. This seems to parallel the situation of the heroine herself, who must block out her own feelings of pain in order to be able to function at all, in order to just survive. It’s almost too perfect an irony that she earns her living by weeping and singing, for cash, at funerals–she can express other peoples’ pain, at the price of repressing her own. As the film progresses, it all gets to be too much; but the camera never falters. A beautiful and unusual film.