Pop Conference

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.

Music Top Ten

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.).

  1. M.I.A., Arular. After all the controversy, still the best beats of the year.
  2. Kevin Blechdom, Eat My Heart Out, which I just wrote about yesterday.
  3. Petra Haden Sings The Who Sell Out. Unearthly.
  4. 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.
  5. 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?
  6. 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).
  7. 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.
  8. 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).
  9. 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).
  10. 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.).

  1. M.I.A., Arular. After all the controversy, still the best beats of the year.
  2. Kevin Blechdom, Eat My Heart Out, which I just wrote about yesterday.
  3. Petra Haden Sings The Who Sell Out. Unearthly.
  4. 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.
  5. 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?
  6. 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).
  7. 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.
  8. 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).
  9. 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).
  10. 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.

Eat My Heart Out

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.

More Alex Cox

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.

Three Businessmen

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…

Homecoming

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.

Platform

Jia Zhang-ke’s Platform is a difficult, but ultimately powerful and haunting film. It’s two and a half hours long (the director’s original cut, apparently, went to over three hours). The film follows the members of a performance troupe (musicians, singers, and dancers) in a provincial Chinese town over the period from 1979 to 1990. It’s challenging, and often hard to follow, because the narrative is so elliptical. The style is mostly long takes and static long shots, beautiful in a kind of spare way. It is hard to get intimate with the characters, because they are so often distant from the camera, and dwarfed by their alienating surroundings (towns with crumbling old buildings or ugly new ones; and in between, as they wander from town to town, there are lots of dusty or desert landscapes). Also, characters appear and disappear without much explanation, over the course of the decade that the film follows. Often we get cuts from one situation to another, seemingly continuous because the same music is playing over the cut, and without any explicit indication of how much time has passed — only gradually do we realize that the new scene is months, or even years, after the previous one, and that important events have happened in the interim, which are not shown but only alluded to. The characters’ lives are desultory and ineffectual — nobody really achieves anything or gets anywhere, either personally or professionally. All their relationships fall apart, more from disinterest than acrimoniousness. They never make it to the big cities, which was their goal from the very beginning. Indeed, they are never successful as performers: nobody has much use for their Maoist morality plays in 1979, and nobody has much use for their lame simulations of hard rocking and disco dancing in 1990. The real drama of the film is precisely this change, or rather the social change of which their stylistic changes are an example: China’s movement from Maoist isolation and totalitarian purism to full-fledged capitalism and international connections. At the start of the film, the small town the troupe comes from has crumbling ruins and only a few Party-owned motor vehicles. In the middle, the troupe is privatized — along with just about everything else we see. By the end, there are traffic jams and all sorts of new construction; money is being made, and society has new groups of winners and losers. The film’s subtlety is that these changes are never directly called attention to; it remains in the background (or literally, as the scenic background). The characters remain too mired in their small personal dilemmas to ever explicitly register how much their own lives have changed, together with the world around them. Everything is conveyed by small references: in the opening sequences, for instance, they flub a performance of a train ride to Chairman Mao’s birthplace, because (it turns out) none of them has ever even seen, much less ridden a train. Years later, and halfway through the movie, they are mired in the middle of nowhere when their truck has broken down; they hear a train coming and run wildly toward the tracks, in the hope that it will stop and pick them up — but they make it to the tracks just too late. (It’s a gorgeous scene, because of the hilly scenery, and because of the pop song “Platform” that gives the film its name — apparently it was a big Chinese hit in the 1980s — it is playing on the truck’s radio for the entire scene). We similarly see the characters’ wardrobes change over the course of the film; they stop wearing Maoist uniforms and gradually discover fashions arriving in their small town from the rest of the world. And we move from scenes where Maoist propaganda music is already playing on the town’s public loudspeakers, to ones where people are casually watching Bollywood films on TV in their own homes. And so, for a large portion of the film, I watched the scenes pass, only vaguely being able to parse what was going on; the film’s larger themes and social commentary sneaked up on me, as it were, and only towards the end did I retrospectively realize how brilliant and meaningful was so much of what had come before. All in all, Platform is a rather depressing film; the characters’ lives, as I’ve already said, go nowhere despite the immense social change that is happening within them as well as all around them. And Jia doesn’t see free-wheeling capitalism as much of an improvement over totalitarian Maoism: a few people get rich, but most of them remain downtrodden victims; and the new freedom they have is mostly just the freedom to be a consumer — to the extent that one’s means allow — and to sample the wares from a larger world which thereby penetrates their village, but which otherwise they will never see. This is what happens, Jia suggests, when his country moves from insularity to globalization, and from socialist poverty (both material and spiritual) to capitalist inequality. At the end of the film, I was left with an immense sense of sadness and loss — despite the fact that nothing tragic has happened, and that the film doesn’t accord its characters anything that they could have lost. It’s just a tale of ordinary depression and oppression, in both socialist and capitalist varieties.

Jia Zhang-ke’s Platform is a difficult, but ultimately powerful and haunting film. It’s two and a half hours long (the director’s original cut, apparently, went to over three hours). The film follows the members of a performance troupe (musicians, singers, and dancers) in a provincial Chinese town over the period from 1979 to 1990. It’s challenging, and often hard to follow, because the narrative is so elliptical. The style is mostly long takes and static long shots, beautiful in a kind of spare way. It is hard to get intimate with the characters, because they are so often distant from the camera, and dwarfed by their alienating surroundings (towns with crumbling old buildings or ugly new ones; and in between, as they wander from town to town, there are lots of dusty or desert landscapes). Also, characters appear and disappear without much explanation, over the course of the decade that the film follows. Often we get cuts from one situation to another, seemingly continuous because the same music is playing over the cut, and without any explicit indication of how much time has passed — only gradually do we realize that the new scene is months, or even years, after the previous one, and that important events have happened in the interim, which are not shown but only alluded to. The characters’ lives are desultory and ineffectual — nobody really achieves anything or gets anywhere, either personally or professionally. All their relationships fall apart, more from disinterest than acrimoniousness. They never make it to the big cities, which was their goal from the very beginning. Indeed, they are never successful as performers: nobody has much use for their Maoist morality plays in 1979, and nobody has much use for their lame simulations of hard rocking and disco dancing in 1990. The real drama of the film is precisely this change, or rather the social change of which their stylistic changes are an example: China’s movement from Maoist isolation and totalitarian purism to full-fledged capitalism and international connections. At the start of the film, the small town the troupe comes from has crumbling ruins and only a few Party-owned motor vehicles. In the middle, the troupe is privatized — along with just about everything else we see. By the end, there are traffic jams and all sorts of new construction; money is being made, and society has new groups of winners and losers. The film’s subtlety is that these changes are never directly called attention to; it remains in the background (or literally, as the scenic background). The characters remain too mired in their small personal dilemmas to ever explicitly register how much their own lives have changed, together with the world around them. Everything is conveyed by small references: in the opening sequences, for instance, they flub a performance of a train ride to Chairman Mao’s birthplace, because (it turns out) none of them has ever even seen, much less ridden a train. Years later, and halfway through the movie, they are mired in the middle of nowhere when their truck has broken down; they hear a train coming and run wildly toward the tracks, in the hope that it will stop and pick them up — but they make it to the tracks just too late. (It’s a gorgeous scene, because of the hilly scenery, and because of the pop song “Platform” that gives the film its name — apparently it was a big Chinese hit in the 1980s — it is playing on the truck’s radio for the entire scene). We similarly see the characters’ wardrobes change over the course of the film; they stop wearing Maoist uniforms and gradually discover fashions arriving in their small town from the rest of the world. And we move from scenes where Maoist propaganda music is already playing on the town’s public loudspeakers, to ones where people are casually watching Bollywood films on TV in their own homes. And so, for a large portion of the film, I watched the scenes pass, only vaguely being able to parse what was going on; the film’s larger themes and social commentary sneaked up on me, as it were, and only towards the end did I retrospectively realize how brilliant and meaningful was so much of what had come before. All in all, Platform is a rather depressing film; the characters’ lives, as I’ve already said, go nowhere despite the immense social change that is happening within them as well as all around them. And Jia doesn’t see free-wheeling capitalism as much of an improvement over totalitarian Maoism: a few people get rich, but most of them remain downtrodden victims; and the new freedom they have is mostly just the freedom to be a consumer — to the extent that one’s means allow — and to sample the wares from a larger world which thereby penetrates their village, but which otherwise they will never see. This is what happens, Jia suggests, when his country moves from insularity to globalization, and from socialist poverty (both material and spiritual) to capitalist inequality. At the end of the film, I was left with an immense sense of sadness and loss — despite the fact that nothing tragic has happened, and that the film doesn’t accord its characters anything that they could have lost. It’s just a tale of ordinary depression and oppression, in both socialist and capitalist varieties.

Double Vision

“Damn, the human mind doesn’t really work the way humans like to think. It’s much more crazed and folded. Backward, switchbacking, switchbladed. Freaked. You humans can’t handle your own heads…” (316).

Tricia Sullivan’s new novel Double Vision (only available in the UK) is her first book since Maul. Like Maul, Double Vision has a double plot, with one strand set in a science-fiction future world, and the other set in (near-)present New Jersey. Karen ‘Cookie” Orbach is an overweight, socially dysfunctional, generally passive young black woman, living in New Jersey in 1984, who hallucinates when she watches TV: instead of seeing the shows everyone else sees, she has visions. Specifically, she becomes a silent eyewitness to a war on another planet. All-woman squadrons of (apparently American) soldiers are attacking, not exactly an enemy army, nor even another species, but a sort of sentient landscape/dreamscape called The Grid, which seems to cover most of the planet. Back in New Jersey, Cookie works for the Dataplex Corporation, which pays her well to report to them what she sees in the war.

The New Jersey narrative is more or less about Cookie learning to affirm herself and take control of her life. The Grid narrative is about… well, it isn’t easy to say. The grid is a hallucinatory, ever-changing labyrinth of pulsing light, and pollen and pheromones, and tree-like branches, all emanating from a thick, viscous, organic liquid called the Well. The Grid is a kind of simulacral mirror: it mimics any organic object or artifact that comes into contact with it, returning it back to you in multiple copies, in a form that is sometimes sinister, and other times just seems like a cruel parody, or a cheap-horror-movie version of the original. The Grid does not recognize the distinctions of cause and effect, subject and object; “it operates according to an acausal connecting principle” (287). The Grid “refus[es] to be nailed down in object form”; it marks a border “between the possible and the actual” (183). The Grid seems to be made of information, yet it is also highly emotional, and somehow “feminine… like anything subject to change, like any body that yields and sacrifices its nature and transforms itself” (99).

The Grid is ontological, in short. It seems to be the matrix of all potentialities and all appearances. It’s dangerous because it messes with your mind, altering you even as it allows itself to be altered by you. But still, it’s unclear why (aside from the usual stupidity of our imperium) American or Earth forces are attacking it, trying to control it or exterminate it, rather than seeking a less violent (more collaborative or dialogic) approach.

But there’s one other thing about the Grid, and it provides the link between the SF story of which Cookie is the observer, and the humdrum reality of her everyday life. The reason that the Dataplex Corporation wants Cookie’s reports from the Grid is that these reports contain, unbeknownst to her, references to advertisements and product placements in the TV shows that Cookie cannot see. Every visual detail, every plot twist, in the war stories that Cookie experiences has its analogue in a very different sort of war: the war of advertising strategies. Analyzing Cookie’s reports, Dataplex is able to inform its corporate clients as to which advertising campaigns will succeed and which will fail. Information about how to penetrate and destroy the Grid is transformed into information about which approaches will penetrate TV viewers’ psychological defenses and influence their purchasing behavior.

Sullivan leaves the relation between these two dimensions of the Grid enigmatic. We live in a world where everything is penetrated by — or better, imbricated with — the flows of capital. Yet of course there is something parasitic about capital. It can’t really create, without hitching a ride, as it were, on forces (nature, bodies, emotions, human labor and pain and passion) that it is unable to originate by and for itself. The Grid is not the power of capital — which is perhaps why the military has been enlisted to destroy it — but it is something that this power cannot do without — which is why the military campaign seems endless, and even why it is in process of being deserted (towards the end of the novel, all the human forces are evacuated from the planet, leaving behind machines to continue the work of destruction… but also leaving behind the disturbingly quasi-human remnants of the Grid’s own mimicries).

For that matter, it’s not entirely clear, either, how the lessons of the Grid help Cookie to pull things more together in her everyday life, to come to terms with being an outsider, a freak, a possible schizophrenic, to overcome her pathological passivity, to deal with the everyday actuality of sexism and boredom and lack of opportunity. But these very uncertainties are what make the novel so compelling. And by the end of the novel, Cookie is able to turn the tables, and — perhaps — channel the powers of the Grid for the here and now of New Jersey, rather than just travel to the Grid as an escape from New Jersey. And that might just mean turning the tables on the culture of advertising and commodities, as well.

“Damn, the human mind doesn’t really work the way humans like to think. It’s much more crazed and folded. Backward, switchbacking, switchbladed. Freaked. You humans can’t handle your own heads…” (316).

Tricia Sullivan’s new novel Double Vision (only available in the UK) is her first book since Maul. Like Maul, Double Vision has a double plot, with one strand set in a science-fiction future world, and the other set in (near-)present New Jersey. Karen ‘Cookie” Orbach is an overweight, socially dysfunctional, generally passive young black woman, living in New Jersey in 1984, who hallucinates when she watches TV: instead of seeing the shows everyone else sees, she has visions. Specifically, she becomes a silent eyewitness to a war on another planet. All-woman squadrons of (apparently American) soldiers are attacking, not exactly an enemy army, nor even another species, but a sort of sentient landscape/dreamscape called The Grid, which seems to cover most of the planet. Back in New Jersey, Cookie works for the Dataplex Corporation, which pays her well to report to them what she sees in the war.

The New Jersey narrative is more or less about Cookie learning to affirm herself and take control of her life. The Grid narrative is about… well, it isn’t easy to say. The grid is a hallucinatory, ever-changing labyrinth of pulsing light, and pollen and pheromones, and tree-like branches, all emanating from a thick, viscous, organic liquid called the Well. The Grid is a kind of simulacral mirror: it mimics any organic object or artifact that comes into contact with it, returning it back to you in multiple copies, in a form that is sometimes sinister, and other times just seems like a cruel parody, or a cheap-horror-movie version of the original. The Grid does not recognize the distinctions of cause and effect, subject and object; “it operates according to an acausal connecting principle” (287). The Grid “refus[es] to be nailed down in object form”; it marks a border “between the possible and the actual” (183). The Grid seems to be made of information, yet it is also highly emotional, and somehow “feminine… like anything subject to change, like any body that yields and sacrifices its nature and transforms itself” (99).

The Grid is ontological, in short. It seems to be the matrix of all potentialities and all appearances. It’s dangerous because it messes with your mind, altering you even as it allows itself to be altered by you. But still, it’s unclear why (aside from the usual stupidity of our imperium) American or Earth forces are attacking it, trying to control it or exterminate it, rather than seeking a less violent (more collaborative or dialogic) approach.

But there’s one other thing about the Grid, and it provides the link between the SF story of which Cookie is the observer, and the humdrum reality of her everyday life. The reason that the Dataplex Corporation wants Cookie’s reports from the Grid is that these reports contain, unbeknownst to her, references to advertisements and product placements in the TV shows that Cookie cannot see. Every visual detail, every plot twist, in the war stories that Cookie experiences has its analogue in a very different sort of war: the war of advertising strategies. Analyzing Cookie’s reports, Dataplex is able to inform its corporate clients as to which advertising campaigns will succeed and which will fail. Information about how to penetrate and destroy the Grid is transformed into information about which approaches will penetrate TV viewers’ psychological defenses and influence their purchasing behavior.

Sullivan leaves the relation between these two dimensions of the Grid enigmatic. We live in a world where everything is penetrated by — or better, imbricated with — the flows of capital. Yet of course there is something parasitic about capital. It can’t really create, without hitching a ride, as it were, on forces (nature, bodies, emotions, human labor and pain and passion) that it is unable to originate by and for itself. The Grid is not the power of capital — which is perhaps why the military has been enlisted to destroy it — but it is something that this power cannot do without — which is why the military campaign seems endless, and even why it is in process of being deserted (towards the end of the novel, all the human forces are evacuated from the planet, leaving behind machines to continue the work of destruction… but also leaving behind the disturbingly quasi-human remnants of the Grid’s own mimicries).

For that matter, it’s not entirely clear, either, how the lessons of the Grid help Cookie to pull things more together in her everyday life, to come to terms with being an outsider, a freak, a possible schizophrenic, to overcome her pathological passivity, to deal with the everyday actuality of sexism and boredom and lack of opportunity. But these very uncertainties are what make the novel so compelling. And by the end of the novel, Cookie is able to turn the tables, and — perhaps — channel the powers of the Grid for the here and now of New Jersey, rather than just travel to the Grid as an escape from New Jersey. And that might just mean turning the tables on the culture of advertising and commodities, as well.