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Song of the Moment (and Stuff)

Friday, January 31, 2003   |  0 Comments

I could be wrong. In fact, a week from now I'll probably look back on this post and wonder how I could have ever thought such a thing. But at this peculiar moment — January 31, 2003, some time around 6 pm EST — I am utterly convinced that The Shins' "The Past and Pending" is the most beautiful song ever recorded.

A friend just passed along this link, which made me laugh. Turns out that Laura Bush just cancelled a planned poetry celebration after learning that one of the invited speakers had encouraged his colleagues to use the event as an opportunity to publicly denounce war on Iraq.

"It came to the attention of the First Lady's Office that some invited guests want to turn what is intended to be a literary event into a political forum," a White House statement said. "While Mrs. Bush understands the right of all Americans to express their political views, this event was designed to celebrate poetry."

Why do I find this amusing? Because the event was intended to celebrate the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson, and Langston Hughes — a homosexual, an atheist intellectual, and a radical Old Left Communist (grossly reductionist caricatures, but you get the point). Apparently Mrs. Bush thinks that readings of Whitman, Dickenson, and Hughes at the White House should be devoid of political content.

Hopefully they'll work out their differences real soon, though. I'd love to hear President Bush reading Hughes's "Let America Be America Again." I mean, can you think of a more patriotic title for a poem?

The State of the Union

Thursday, January 30, 2003   |  0 Comments

Thoughts on the State of the Union.

To lift the standards of our public schools, we achieved historic education reform -- which must now be carried out in every school and in every classroom, so that every child in America can read and learn and succeed in life. To protect our country, we reorganized our government and created the Department of Homeland Security, which is mobilizing against the threats of a new era. To bring our economy out of recession, we delivered the largest tax relief in a generation. To insist on integrity in American business we passed tough reforms, and we are holding corporate criminals to account.

I realize that Bush is fiercely pro-life and that he has an inspirational Christian testimony, so I understand why he has garnered blind support from certain portions of the Right. What I don't get is his claims of conservatism. When I think conservative, I think fiscal responsibility, small government, states' rights, and isolationism. The Bush administration is none of the above. After deriding Gore as a "nation-builder" during the 2000 debates and promising to never use our military for such purposes, Bush has ushered in a new age of American imperialism, even winning from Congress the right to launch unilateral pre-emptive strikes on sovereign nations.

Bush's "education reforms" have likewise helped to grow the Federal government to its largest size ever and have mandated unprecedented Federal control over local school systems. His Department of Homeland Security now exercises the authority to monitor our private lives with near complete abandon. And his mismanagement of the economy has cost us billions of dollars and thousands of jobs. (Before you claim that he inherited a bloated economy from Clinton, which is partly true, explain to me why Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and most of Bush's other chief economic advisors were ushered out in the closing weeks of 2002.) If we can't count on a Republican President for fiscal conservatism, what's the point?

A friend and I were discussing all of this last night, trying, as objectively as possible, to understand what is so conservative about Bush's brand of "compassionate conservatism." (Don't get me started on the "compassionate" part.) This morning he sent me this link, writing, "Someone's reading your mind."

To boost investor confidence, and to help the nearly 10 million senior who receive dividend income, I ask you to end the unfair double taxation of dividends.

New rule: No one is allowed to play the "senior" card unless they're discussing, well, seniors. To spin the dividend cut as a compassionate move in the interest of seniors is just dishonest. I can only imagine what kind of lightbulbs went off when someone coined the phrase "double taxation." Mark my words, we'll be hearing a lot more of that one in the coming weeks.

Join me in this important innovation to make our air significantly cleaner, and our country much less dependent on foreign sources of energy.

Environment-friendly Bush? I wonder if you can buy that in a two-pack with the "Pro-Affirmative-Action Lott" doll?

I urge you to pass both my faith-based initiative and the Citizen Service Act, to encourage acts of compassion that can transform America, one heart and one soul at a time.

See, now I actually like this idea in theory, but there is no way it will have legs if it ever squeaks through Congress. The other day, I flipped on an episode of "Random People Arguing" on CNNMSNBCFOX and caught a remarkable exchange between Jerry Falwell and Strawman Liberal Methodist Minister. SLMM did his very best to pin Falwell down with the following question: "Do you support the government's use of your tax money for the funding of Muslim charities?" Falwell absolutely refused to answer the question, doing his best to maintain that tattooed grin. But SLMM continued to press until the two men regressed to adolescence right before my eyes. Honestly, Falwell threatened him. It was surreal. Dada, even.

And that's exactly what we're going to get in Congress when politicians begin trying to divvy up Federal monies for distribution to "faith-based" initiatives. Again, I can't imagine why any conservative would support this.

Too many Americans in search of [drug] treatment cannot get it. So tonight I propose a new $600-million program to help an additional 300,000 Americans receive treatment over the next three years.

Can you imagine if Clinton had tried this? Lott, Robertson, and Buchanan would have called him a Socialist.

In the Middle East, we will continue to seek peace between a secure Israel and a democratic Palestine.

Interesting. Let's move on.

I ask the Congress to commit $15 billion over the next five years, including nearly $10 billion in new money, to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean.

Well I'll be damned. You know who's responsible for this, don't you? Bono, and God bless him for it. If Bush gets half of that amount out of Congress, I'll be the first person to thank him. I can only imagine what kinds of "reproduction-related" measures will be attached to this one.

Many [alleged al Quaeda operatives] have met a different fate. Let's put it this way -- they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.

Henry Kissenger couldn't have said it better himself.

As we fight this war, we will remember where it began -- here, in our own country.

Interesting. Let's move on.

Whatever the duration of this struggle, and whatever the difficulties, we will not permit the triumph of violence in the affairs of men -- free people will set the course of history.

This one is probably too obvious to even be worth mentioning, but with "we will not permit the triumph of violence in the affairs of men," Bush has secured his place in the Meaningless Double-Speak Hall of Fame.

In each case, the ambitions of Hitlerism, militarism, and communism were defeated by the will of free peoples, by the strength of great alliances, and by the might of the United States of America.

Note to self: use this line in the conclusion of your dissertation. I couldn't possibly imagine what "militarism" means in this context, but if this isn't proof that the Cold War is alive and well, nothing is. How much do you want to bet that an earlier draft of this speech used "fascism" instead of "Hitlerism"? I guarantee it. Probably something like this:

Bush: "What's fascism again?"
Rove: "Yeah, good point. Let's change that to, uh, How 'bout Hitlerism?"
Speechwriter: "Hmmm, I don't think that's a word."
silent stares from Bush and Rove
Speechwriter: "Hitlerism works for me."

Tonight I have a message for the men and women who will keep the peace, members of the American Armed Forces. . . .

If war is forced upon us, we will fight in a just cause and by just means -- sparing, in every way we can, the innocent. And if war is forced upon us, we will fight with the full force and might of the United States military -- and we will prevail.

Note: I'm praying that we will somehow avoid this war because I don't feel it is theologically just (despite Bush's deliberate efforts to work that word into his rhetoric). Because I don't think this war is justified, I feel that any casualties, any casualties, would be tragic and senseless wastes of lives that were created by God for more meaningful purposes. So please don't take this as knee-jerk anti-Americanism, a phrase that, in recent weeks, has been thrown around much too casually and ignorantly by Rush Limbaugh and his ilk:

This and this is how our forces will "keep the peace."

Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity. We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know -- we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history. May He guide us now. And may God continue to bless the United States of America.

This will be my most carefully measured comment. The histories of nations that have exercised imperial force under the guise of Providence should be telling to all but the most blindly ill-informed and arrogant.

Cassavetes

Wednesday, January 29, 2003   |  0 Comments

John Cassevetes is my latest obsession. On a whim, I recently picked up a used copy of Faces (1968), the story of Dicky and Maria Forst's disastrous attempts to find peace and companionship outside of their loveless marriage. Shot entirely in stark, high-contrast black-and-white, and featuring Cassevetes's trademark dialogue, Faces feels at times like a documentary — voyeuristic, discomforting, and brutally real.

It took me about 15 minutes to fall into the film's rhythms and style — the opening sequence might be its weakest — but by the time we see Dicky and Maria alone together at the dinner table, I was absolutely hooked. Faces is like the New Wave meets Edward Albee, as it builds its emotional conflict from the tension between the characters' false surface bravado and all of those painfully insecure close-ups. I'm amazed by how genuine some of the shifts in emotion feel. About Faces, David Walsh writes:

But the best moments are sublime, lacerating. “Cassavetes stays with his tormented, alienated characters,” wrote critic Andrew Sarris in December, 1968, “until they break through the other side of slice-of-life naturalism into emotional and artistic truth.”

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) might be a more refined film, but it's also, I think, less satisfying. Ben Gazarra's performance as Cosmo Vitelli, a strip club owner deep in debt to dangerous men, is always convincing and occasionally brilliant. But nowhere does he (or maybe it's the material) reach the same plaintive heights achieved by Lynn Carlin and Gena Rowlands in Faces. Still, though, his closing monologue is the best scene I've seen in some time. His fate is now sealed, yet he manages to inspire a strange joy and pride and community among his performers. It's almost like a moment of grace.

Special mention goes to Bookie for featuring the always fascinating Tim Carey, most memorable for his performances in the early Kubrick films, The Killing and Paths of Glory. There are several scenes here in which his castmates (especially Seymour Cassel) seem almost apprehensive — or even afraid — around Carey. Those moments give the film a nice spark, an odd bit of unpredictable energy.

Adaptation

Sunday, January 26, 2003   |  0 Comments

Last night my wife made some kind of sarcastic comment — a not unusual occurrence around our home — and I responded with, "Oh, honey, irony is so 2001." After two or three seconds of silence we both laughed.

The problems of irony, particularly when of the postmodern bent, are on mind-numbing display in Adaptation, a film that collapses under its own self-referential weight so many times that, at some point — and I think it was right about the time that Meryl Streep started humping Chris Cooper — I stopped watching the film and began waiting for it to end. Which is a shame because there are moments in it that are quite good, especially those few scenes when we get to listen to Susan Orlean's beautiful prose in voice over. If we are to believe anything in the script — a big if, I realize — we can assume that it was that prose that inspired Charlie Kaufman to begin his adaptation in the first place. Or maybe it was the beauty, that most mysterious and troublesome of encounters for the postmodern ironist. I feel about Adaptation like I did the Coens' The Man Who Wasn't There a little over a year ago: I'd be much more willing to accept their cynicism if they hadn't given me glimpses of something more.

But as the Coens, Kaufman, and Spike Jonze would surely tell me, "That is precisely our point, man." (Well, I don't know if they'd add the "man," but most apologists for these films probably would.) There's even a nice little bit in Adaptation when Donald Kaufman tells his brother that he's decided to add to his screenplay a "snake eating its own tail." "Ouroboros," Charlie tells him. "He's called Ouroboros, and that's me." Get it? Kaufman (the real Kaufman) has covered all the bases, predicted and undercut our arguments, sealed off any avenue of epistemological escape. And you know what? I just don't care.

Adaptation may have felt fresh to me if it had been released thirty-five years ago, or if I had never watched a Godard film or read The French Lieutenant's Woman (and seen the adaptation, also starring Streep), or if I were oblivious to Sam Shepard, whose True West casts a formidable shadow here. But it's not fresh and, aside from several amazing performances, it's not even that interesting. I can't decide if that opinion leaves me resigned to the realm of the unhip or if I've somehow transcended the unhip and circled back around to hip again. But, again, who really cares?

On a side note, before Adaptation I was subjected to the trailer for Bruce Willis's next film, Tears of the Sun. Based on this trailer alone, I'm going to pray that this film not only fails miserably at the box office, but that it takes down the careers of everyone involved, too. Imagine a jingoistic and imperialist version of Rambo. (See? There remains the proper time and place for effective irony.)

Time Out

Saturday, January 25, 2003   |  0 Comments

What separates Time Out (2001) from the recent spate of "disillusioned upper-middle-class white guy has a breakdown" movies is writer/director Laurent Cantet's interest in the specific economic forces that lead — some would say inevitably — to such discontent. Aurélien Recoing plays Vincent, recently fired from a position he had held unhappily for more than a decade. Ashamed of his failure and unable to escape nagging anxieties, Vincent reinvents himself as an imagined UN employee, while bilking friends out of investment capital that will, he assures them, return steep profits in Africa's "emerging markets."

American treatments of this theme tend to elide the messy problems of multinational capitalism — the massive systems of exploitation and profit that reify workers at every stage. Cantet refuses to let us off so easily. Employing an odd mixture of Hitchcockian logic and late-Bressonian critique, he drops us instantly into a world of systematic victimization where the conflation of financial and humanitarian interests, now indistinguishable from one another in our contemporary public discourse, is exposed as fraudulent and disastrous. Unlike, say, American Beauty, which (satire or not) encourages us to take delight in Lester's impotent rebellion, Time Out forces us to suffer alongside our representative hero. Whereas Lester gets to experience something like grace (or so the film's defenders would argue), Vincent's fate is determined, once again, by market forces. As his wealthy and influential father tells him in the penultimate scene, "Money problems can always be solved."

Old Man Winter

Friday, January 24, 2003   |  0 Comments

Okay, Canada, enough with the cold fronts already. I got in my car this morning and discovered, of course, that I needed to get gas. I could only manage to pump about $10 worth before my pants started to hurt. Who knew that pants could hurt? Apparently that happens somewhere around -15 wind chill.

Knoxville is now covered by a half-inch film of frozen snow. I don't remember seeing anything like it in Maryland, where I grew up. The little bit of snow that remains has hardened into a single, massive, brittle sheet of let's-make-Darren-fall-on-his-ass-then-laugh ice. If you're from the north and are rolling your eyes at the moment, let me tell you something: I moved south ten years ago because I'm smart enough to know that being this cold sucks.

By the way, I think I've unmasked Old Man Winter. I knew he was a Canadian.

Further proof that the Internet is indescribably bizarre: My 2002 Year in Film comments are posted right next to Wim Wenders's.

Close-Up

Thursday, January 23, 2003   |  0 Comments

Abbas Kiarostami's Close-Up (1990) is so damn good. Part documentary, part courtroom drama, part meditation on the meaning and value of art, it speaks more eloquently and more earnestly about the problems of postmodern identity than anything Charlie Kaufman could invent, and without all of those self-congratulatory winks to the audience. Ed Gonzalez has a great piece on the film at Slant. The last sentence of this first paragraph explains why, I think, the film works so well for me:

By 1990, Abbas Kiarastomi and Mohsen Makhmalbaf were still two or three films away from heralding Iranian Cinema as the next great cinematic wave. No one but Kiarostami seemed capable of recognizing the significance of Hossein Sabzian's affront to realism in cinema when he took on Makhmalbaf's namesake. Call it what you will (documentary, mockumentary, self-fulfilling prophecy), Close Up is still the definitive film-on-film commentary. At its simplest, Kiarostami's masterpiece tackles Sabzian's moral justification for taking on Makhmalbaf's identity (for him, it arose from his love of the arts). Close Up's genius, though, is not that it suggests that there's no legal and/or moral justification for Sabzian's actions but that Sabzian's defense is impossible to fathom unless the spectator can share the man's passion for art as cultural and intellectual emancipator.

Close-Up was among my first batch of rentals from GreenCine, who are based in San Francisco and who claim to be serving the interests of art lovers.

GreenCine carries the best selection of off-the-wall indie, arthouse and excellent DVD fare out there. GreenCine is about a life of art and the art of life AND celebrating a return of the arts to the Bay Area. GreenCine is about community AND making sure great filmmakers, art houses and festivalgoers all have a place they can call home. We're committed to the community of artists who make it happen, in a City that's happening - and we want you to be involved!

I spent several years with Netflix before becoming frustrated by lost DVDs and slow shipping times. I received my order from GreenCine five days after signing up, which isn't bad considering that there was a holiday weekend thrown in there. The major perk, though, is their selection, which is much more eclectic than their rivals.

I'm at home today, enjoying my view of the five or six inches of snow that fell last night. It's really cold by Knoxville standards, with wind chills dropping into the negative numbers. Some fun links to keep you warm:

• The Onion's interview with the team of reporters from The Daily Show. I actually wept at my disk while reading this yesterday.
• I don't care what Richard Gere says, Harvey Weinstein is still a jackass.
• Origami Boulder. I'm especially impressed by the performance art option.

Astroturfing

Wednesday, January 22, 2003   |  0 Comments

Oh, man. This is so creepy. Check out this letter to the editor from my local rag, the Knox-News Sentinel:

When it comes to the economy, President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership. The economic growth package he recently proposed takes us in the right direction by accelerating the successful tax cuts of 2001, providing marriage penalty relief and providing incentives for individuals and small businesses to save and invest.

Contrary to the class-warfare rhetoric attacking the president's plan, the proposal helps everyone who pays taxes and especially the middle class. This year alone, 92 million taxpayers will receive an immediate tax cut averaging $1,083 - and 46 million married couples will get back an average of $1,714.

That's not pocket change for a family struggling through uncertain economic times. Combined with the president's new initiatives to help the unemployed, this plan gets people back to work and helps every sector of our economy.

J.Y. Moore
Gatlinburg

Not too strange, eh? Well, not until you read this this one from The Times in Mississippi:

Dear Editor: When it comes to the economy, President Bush is demonstrating genuine leadership. The economic growth package he recently proposed takes us in the right direction by accelerating the successful tax cuts of 2001, providing marriage penalty relief, and providing incentives for individuals and small businesses to save and invest.

Contrary to the class warfare rhetoric attacking the President’s plan, the proposal helps everyone who pays taxes, and especially the middle class.

This year alone, 92 million taxpayers will receive an immediate tax cut averaging $1,083 - and 46 million married couples will get back an average of $1,714. That’s not pocket change for a family struggling through uncertain economic times. Combined with the Presiden’s new initiatives to help the unemployed, this plan gets people back to work and helps every sector of our economy.

Sincerely,

Linda Shaffer
Ellisville

And this one from the Spectrum in Utah.

And this one from the Star Press in Indiana.

And this one from the Boston Globe.

And this one from the Green Bay Press-Gazette.

And thirty or forty others that can be found with a simple Web search. Folks are calling it astroturfing. Get it? It's a fake grass roots movement. Apparently the GOP is now taking its marketing cues from the guys behind The Blair Witch Project. Very creepy.

The Rise and Fall of the American Left (1992)

Tuesday, January 21, 2003   |  0 Comments

By John Patrick Diggins

For Diggins, the first problem facing any historian of the American Left is one of basic terminology. “The characteristics most often used to define the Left,” he writes, “the demand for change; political ideals like justice, equality, and democracy; anticapitalism and the tactic of dissent; the mentalities of rationalism and ideology—are either so broad as to include many other political elements or so narrow as to apply to one American Left and not to others” (39). In the opening chapter of The Rise and Fall of the American Left, Diggins briefly examines each of these assumed traits, exposing the contradictions inherent in each. Finally, he implies that the Left can most appropriately be defined by its admittedly naïve faith in the radical perfectibility of society, or, even more succinctly, by the gap that exists between these two questions: “What is real? What is possible?” (42).

Of particular interest to Diggins is the strange partnership of intellectuals and the working class that has characterized so much of the history of the American Left. He traces the origins of that partnership to the Pragmatists and to Karl Marx. From people like William James and John Dewey the Left inherited a brand of existential idealism that turned Man into a force capable of “willing” its influence on history. From Marx came a faith in the collective power of the proletariat and the theory that would direct their “inevitable” triumph over capitalism. The partnership, however, has always been a site of conflict and paradox. “By and large,” Diggins writes, “American socialism was a movement not of but on behalf of the working class. Although it presumed to speak for the workers and to articulate their needs, the doctrines and tactics had been developed by intellectuals and party leaders” (90).

Diggins divides his history into four phases: the Lyrical Left, the Old Left, the New Left, and the Academic Left. The first phase (like the penultimate) was born largely in opposition to all that preceded it. “The young intellectuals,” Diggins argues, “cheerfully presided over the death of the ‘genteel tradition’ as they attacked its Victorian standards, its polite manners and haut-bourgeois tastes, its Puritan heritage and decorous Brahmin literature, and, above all, its condescending certainty that it had found ultimate truth and absolute value” (97). The Lyrical Left grew up from the pre-WWI years when the Socialist Party carried considerable weight in popular American politics, most notably in the figurehead of Eugene Debs. Diggins devotes his energies to profiles of Debs and other important leaders of the movement: John Reed, Emma Goldman, Daniel DeLeon, Big Bill Haywood, along with many of the artists and intellectuals who congregated in Greenwich Village and Harlem, including Mabel Dodge, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer.

I’m most fascinated by Max Eastman, a novelist, poet, feminist, and editor of Masses, who wrestled constantly with the problems of idealism and pragmatism. When, in the early-1920s, many leftist intellectuals in America became disillusioned by Lenin’s turn to the right and by Stalin’s succession, Eastman turned to a practical analysis of Marxism. “The crux of Eastman’s critique of dialectical materialism,” writes Diggins, “was that belief in the inevitability of communism was a dubious scientific proposition. That capitalism morally ‘ought’ to collapse was no basis for predicting that it would” (123). Decades later some in the New Left would return to Eastman’s analysis, but in the 1920s it was powerless to overcome the combined force of heated domestic pressure (inspired in part by the SP’s official anti-war stance) and the violent suppression of Trotsky and his supporters in the Soviet Union. The Lyrical Left collapsed soon after it began.

The Old Left should have been born of the widespread proletariat revolt that followed the “inevitable” (orthodox Marxism would argue) collapse of the stock market in 1929, except that no such revolt occurred. Instead, the American worker often blamed himself for his own personal failings. “The extent of this psychic wound,” writes Diggins, “indicates how much America’s working class had absorbed the values of capitalist individualism” (146). The lingering effects of the Great Depression did, however, incite a growing interest in the American Communist Party, but its message and political influence were quickly fractured and diluted by a host of foreign and domestic forces. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s purges, the Moscow Trials, and, in 1939, the forging of a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany deflated the Old Left’s faith in the Comintern and awakened leftist intellectuals to their own naivety. At home, the Popular Front combined with Roosevelt’s New Deal diplomacy to further liberalize socialism. Diggins writes:

Roosevelt’s ability to steer a middle course between capitalist exploitation and socialist expropriation, while at the same time preserving traditional democratic institutions, seemed more attractive to disillusioned radicals who found a new respect for the politics of moderations as they watched the politics of extremism in Germany and Russia. (189)

With America’s victory over Fascism in Europe, the lowering of American employment due to the booming postwar economy, and the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, the Old Left’s traditional tropes were destabilized. As Diggins notes, the Left was forced to throw off Marxist orthodoxy and admit “that democratic freedom and one-party dictatorships are incompatible” (216). The New York Intellectuals and the left-leaning journals of the day—Partisan Review, Commentary, Dissent—suddenly experienced a strange and surprising patriotism (or something like it). Leftist philosophers, historians, economists, theologians, and politicians were all left to explain America’s “exceptionalism,” its unique ability to withstand the pressures of history that Marx had predicted. Instead of collapsing under the weight of proletariat revolt, America’s economy thrived, sending workers into the post-industrial age of conspicuous consumption and suburban alienation.

Diggins’s chapter on the New Left opens with an interesting epigraph from Stephen Spender:

Nothing is clearer to a later generation than the naivety of an earlier one, just as nothing is clearer to the earlier one than the naivety of the later. (218)

It’s a nice snapshot of the attitudes that separated the Old Left from the New and that continue to trouble the Left’s search for praxis. Diggins draws connections between the two movements in broad strokes, then focuses his gaze on the leading thinkers of the era—C. Wright Mills, William Williams, Michael Harrington, Herbert Marcuse, and Daniel Bell, in particular—and the related but separate movements that they helped to inspire, including the Beats, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Free Speech Movement, The Progressive Labor Party, hippies, the Black Panthers, and the Weathermen. Ultimately, Diggins argues, the New Left failed because it disregarded the lessons of history. He writes:

The charge that the New Left lacked a coherent, unified movement seems less an explanation of its defeat than a definition of its essence. Opposing bureaucracy, it relied upon spontaneous activity, and its suspicion of the hierarchical tendencies of organizational structures precluded the possibility that a sense of leadership could emerge with a single voice. The actual reason for its failure was the assumption that it stood for more than itself. History did not come through for the New Left, because the missing ingredient of radical mythology never appeared—the agency of change. The central dilemma that has face all three Lefts in twentieth-century America is the inability to find a social force that would adopt a commitment of active opposition to existing order. (265)

In the days and years following the debacle at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the New Left’s failure to discover that “social force” was put on display with increasing frequency. Nixon rode into office on the promise of restoring “law and order” to the country. And the one issue around which all of the New Left could once unite, opposition to Vietnam, was so universalized by 1970 that it became a dead dogma. In Diggins’s opinion, the New Left, now without a radical public constituency, was forced to flee to the one institution against which it had most actively revolted: the ivory towers of academia.

The final chapters of The Rise and Fall of the American Left are devoted to Diggins’s treatment of the Academic Left that has found its voice in critical theory, the goal of which is “to demystify the mechanisms that rule people’s lives under the guise of accepted necessities” (346). Here, Diggins runs through the standard icons of 80s theory—Habbermas and Adorno, Foucault and Derrida, Eagleton and Jameson—emphasizing the problems of relativism that has plagued so much of postmodern though. I got a kick out of this little cheap shot: “Formerly the Left set out to comprehend the world in order to change it and to speak truth to power. The contemporary Academic Left can barely grapple with the ‘undecidability’ of texts” (373).

Ultimately, though, Diggins argues that the Academic Left is doomed to fail unless they reestablish something of their faith in the Enlightenment, “wherein both liberal pragmatism and Marxian socialism, the major intellectual ingredients in all four Lefts, derived their heritage” (383). For that reason, the only contemporary theorist for which he holds much hope is Richard Rorty, who like Dewey, acknowledged that although “one cannot know truth and reality directly, . . . one can, by keeping intelligence active, cope with experience” (368). It’s a refreshing, if necessarily measured, bit of optimism. Diggins has since written several books on Schlesinger, Weber, and Pragmatism. I wonder if any of that optimism remains.

The Agony of the American Left

Sunday, January 19, 2003   |  0 Comments

By Christopher Lasch

Spanning the years from the Populist movement of the 1890s to the radical politics of the 1960s, Lasch’s study offers a useful analysis of many of the social, economic, and political forces that have combined to frustrate the American Left in its search for a politically potent mixture of theory and action. Writing during the heydays of the New Left, Lasch argues that such analysis is conspicuously absent from much of the contemporary debate, leading throngs of young radicals toward heroic nihilism and impotent protest, and squelching their potential in the process. Ultimately, though, Lasch’s book, like so much of leftist intellectual thought, is better at theory than action, better at uncovering the faults of past movements than offering workable alternatives. Like the New Left itself, this book peters out near the end, unable to muster the energy for long-term resistance.

Throughout The Agony of the American Left, Lasch suggests that the promise of the Left lies in the establishment of a new brand of socialism, one modified drastically from those modeled in underdeveloped nations and uniquely capable of exploiting America’s machinelike economy toward collective ends. His argument takes root first in his distinction between late-19th century Populism and Socialism. That division, he feels, created too many missed opportunities. In particular, it prevented the formation of larger coalitions around shared progressive interests. Drawing helpful connections between those past mistakes and Nixon-era America, Lasch writes:

Organization, in fact, was achieved precisely by eliminating in advance all who could not be organized with a minimum of effort—immigrants, Negroes, sharecroppers, hillbillies; the ‘culturally deprived.’ Poverty has not been eliminated, it has merely been concealed. Because they are both ‘invisible’ and voiceless, the millions of poor have no way of making their presence felt except by violence; but precisely because they are leaderless and unorganized, violence, once it erupts, cannot be directed by radicals toward political objectives. (30)

As Lasch points out, in the years surrounding WWI, socialism held considerable sway in American politics. “In 1912,” he writes, “the year Eugene V. Debs polled six per cent of the Presidential vote, Socialists held 1,200 offices in 340 cities, including 79 mayors in 24 states. As late as 1918, they elected 32 state legislators. In 1916, they elected Meyer London to Congress and made important gains in the municipal elections of several large cities” (35). But by the mid-20s, perhaps reflecting the combined influence of America’s booming industrialism and the growing isolationism of its foreign policy, the movement had lost its momentum, and “American radicalism had acquired the characteristics it has retained until the present day: sectarianism, marginality, and alienation from American life” (40). Of course, the liberalism and anticommunist sentiment that characterized so much of the political discourse during the post-WWII years only served to further bury the Left.

In the second and third chapters, Lasch uses two case studies, The Partisan Review and The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), to expose the double-bind facing leftist intellectuals during the most heated of the Cold War years. Members of the CCF, for example, found themselves fighting for “cultural freedom” while maintaining a virulent anticommunist posture, which forced them to stake out an ambivalent position on, say, the Rosenbergs—"[The] pre-eminent fact of the Rosenbergs’ guilt must be openly acknowledged before any appeal for clemency can be regarded as having been made in good faith”—and Arthur Miller, who “had made an unforgivable mistake: he had criticized political interference with art not only in the Soviet Union but in the United States, thereby implying that the two situations were comparable” (87, 90). Ultimately, it was discovered that the CCF’s position was more compromised than anyone had imagined. Like so many other supposed mouth pieces of the Left, the American CCF’s journal, Encounter, was later revealed to have been supported by the CIA. Lasch writes:

The modern state, among other things, is an engine of propaganda, alternately manufacturing crises and claiming to be the only instrument that can effectively deal with them. This propaganda, in order to be successful, demands the cooperation of writers, teachers, and artists not as paid propagandists or state-censored time-servers but as ‘free’ intellectuals capable of policing their own jurisdictions and of enforcing acceptable standards of responsibility within the various intellectual professions.

A system like this presupposes two things: a high degree of professional consciousness among intellectuals, and general economic affluence which frees the patrons of intellectual life from the need to account for the money they spend on culture. Once these conditions exist, as they have existed in the United States for some time, intellectuals can be trusted to censor themselves, and crude ‘political’ influence over intellectual life comes to seem passé. (94-95)

The end result is that American intellectuals found (some would say find) themselves in a Pynchonesque nightmare of absurd miscommunication, all of which masks harsh political realities for the sake of furthering capitalist gains. “'What would a ‘free thinker’ do, asks the Sunday Times of London, ‘when he finds out that his free thought has been subsidized by a ruthlessly aggressive intelligence agency as part of the international cold war?’ According to the curious values that prevail in American society, he should make a redoubled effort to salvage the reputation of organizations that have been compromised, it would seem, beyond redemption.”

The final chapters of The Agony of the American Left examine the strange ties that bound the Black Power movement with the predominantly white New Left. For Lasch, they were most closely united by their failings. They shared, he writes, “romantic anarchism but several other features as well, none of them (it must be said) conducive to its success—a pronounced distrust of people over thirty, a sense of powerlessness and despair, for which the revolutionary rhetoric serves to compensate, and a tendency to substitute rhetoric for political analysis and defiant gestures for political action” (131). For his analysis of Black Power—a really interesting read, I should mention—Lasch relies heavily on Harold Cruse’s The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, which argues that the movement is marked by a lack of theory and historical understanding. Like the New Left, it is dominated by emotional rhetoric and generic “resistance,” but the solutions it offers evidence a naïve misunderstanding of the economic forces that shape America’s social structures. For instance, Lasch asks the provocative question: Do ghettos exist because “powerful interests have a stake in perpetuating them,” or because “American society can get along so well without black people that there is not motive either to integrate them by getting rid of the ghettos or to allow the ghettos to govern themselves”? (132). That Black Power had no answer, just as the New Left had no specific, sustainable goals in its disruptions of campus life, only exacerbates the Left’s agony.

For Lasch, the New Left is a failure both for reasons beyond their control and for problems of their own making. Had they been offered glimpses of progress, they may have moved toward more thoughtful analysis and greater cooperation. Instead, their peace movements were met only by further escalations in Vietnam. Their dovish President (Johnson) turned hawk once reelected. Their most promising candidate (RFK) was lost in another in a series of senseless assassinations. And instead, they were left with riots in Chicago and Humphrey as their nomination. Lasch suggests that the last promise of the Left remains in the founding of a new socialist majority. “In other words,” he writes:

the Left has to begin to function not as a protest movement or a third party but as an alternative political system, drawing on the abilities of people who realize that their talents are often wasted in their present jobs. It has to generate analysis and plans for action in which people of varying commitments to radicalism can take part, while at the same time it must insist that the best hope of creating a decent society in the United States is to evolve a socialism appropriate to American conditions. (200-01)

But aside from his thoughtful analysis, Lasch offers little insight into how such a socialist consensus might be formed. “In espousing decentralization, local control, and a generally antibureaucratic outlook, and by insisting that these values are at the heart of radicalism, the New Left has shown American socialists the road they must follow” (211). In the margin I wrote, “Is that it?” Like Lasch, I’m seeking praxis. I only wish that he would have put more of his theory into action.

Song of the Moment

Friday, January 17, 2003   |  0 Comments

I caught a great episode of Austin City Limits last Saturday night. The first half featured Spoon, a band from Austin that reminds me quite a bit of early Elvis Costello with maybe some Husker Du thrown in for good measure. "That's the Way We Get By" is just ridiculously catchy. I've been listening to a mix of about 40 songs at work this week, and this one never fails to shake me free of that awful day job trance.

Ben Kweller took stage for the second half of the show. Like Kweller, I've been playing piano since I could walk and noodling with a guitar for more than a decade. We also both like to write songs. The difference is that he's really good at all three (particularly writing songs), and he recently put out a great debut album, and he's only 22. Bastard. Kweller's also a Texan, and you can hear it in a few songs, especially "family tree" and "Lizzy," which would sound pretty good coming out of Lyle Lovett. At other times I guess you could say he sounds more like Weezer. "How It Should Be" is just great pop.

Nixon on Art

Tuesday, January 14, 2003   |  0 Comments

It's not every day that I link to the Weekly Standard, but this is just too surreal to pass up. In "Still the One," Andrew Ferguson goes digging through the Nixon tapes and finds gold. Old Dick will always be a wonderful mystery to me. (That last sentence might get me some Google traffic.) I can't imagine that I could possibly offer comments that would do this stuff justice. Kind of speaks for itself, eh?

The next meeting that morning concerned the arts.

Nixon's presidency was the most generous ever enjoyed by the arts establishment in the United States. Representing that establishment in the administration were Nixon's old law partner Leonard Garment and, preeminently, Nancy Hanks, a former director of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and thus, ex officio, a life member of the Eastern Establishment.

On the tape, Nixon says he wants to talk about the film industry.

"Now, Nancy, it turns out, 52 percent of the movies we see here in the United States were made abroad. What I want to do is find a way to keep these damn foreign movies out. Oh, I know they're supposed to be so damn great and so forth. To tell you the truth, I don't see many movies. Saw 'Love Story.' 'Patton.' But my point is, I will not have America slip to number two in the world when it comes to movies."

Mrs. Hanks protests that the popularity of foreign movies is owing to their superior quality.

"Well, then, here's what I want you to do. I want you to take it to the movie industry. You tell 'em, You've got to start producing good movies. Say: No more of this weird stuff! Shape up!

"The family movie is coming back, you know. People don't like arty. They don't like offbeat.

"But the film industry, they're trying to reflect the intelligentsia"--the word drips with venom--"and that is their big mistake. Following the intelligentsia is where they always go wrong. Look at these film schools today. All they do is the weird stuff. They produce weird movies. They produce weird people."

But Hanks and Garment have come to talk not about the movies but about the government's grandest current project for the arts, the construction of the Hirshhorn Sculpture Museum on the National Mall.

"Is this going to be some of that--that modern art?" Nixon asks suspiciously.

"It is, Mr. President," Mrs. Hanks replies, in her Rockefeller voice. "It's one of the finest collections of modern sculpture in the world." In the wuld.

quot;Oh yeah?" Silence. Then: "Don't let it be one of those horrible modern buildings, all right? 'Cause if it is, we're not going to do it."

Garment and Hanks try to explain that the plans have already been approved.

Nixon's voice deepens. "I will not have the Mall desecrated with one of those horrible goddamn modern atrocities like they have in New York with that, what is it, that Whitney thing. Jesus H. Christ. If it looks like that, it--will--not--happen."

Silence.

"And I don't want 'controversial,' either. All right? Now this list for the board or whatever. Am I stuck with these names?"

Garment assures him the list for the museum's board of directors can still be changed.

"Good. I'm taking all the Easterners off of here. Got that? Every single one. And this name--what's--some Harvard name. Know him. Part of the Eastern Establishment. Rich guy, but he'll never lift a finger to help us. Well, the hell with him. Am I right?"

Nixon mentions names of California donors he would like placed on the Hirshhorn board.

"Just put 'em on the list," he says. "I mean, why not? Think they'll make the thing a disaster? They can't make it a disaster because it's a disaster already!"

quot;No, no, Mr. President," Mrs. Hanks scolds. "It will not be a disaster!"

"Oh, come on, Nancy," Nixon says quietly. "I've seen the plans."

Another silence.

"Well," he says at last, "I wash my hands of the damn thing. Just make sure I don't have to see it when I look out this window."

And there it is: an entire administration in miniature, the capitulation of the tough-talking Republican. The damn building got built, of course, and the Hirshhorn is indeed an atrocity, as Nixon knew it would be, rising up on the Mall without windows or warmth, poured from dun-colored concrete in the shape of a giant automotive air filter.

Why did they hate him so? "They" did get their building, after all, and so much else from him, too. A few hours in the tape room at Archives II, though, makes the answer plain: They hated him because he hated them. Deep as it was, the hatred wasn't about politics. It cut much closer to the vitals--into culture, disposition, class, I'm not sure what to call it. One of Nixon's legacies indeed is to demonstrate the puniness of politics, its relative insignificance in the larger scheme of what moves men to do what they do. His enemies knew he wasn't one of them, and though he may have tried to buy their trust with every kind of political concession, Nixon knew it too. He hated them for it and vice versa. And the hatred, both his and theirs, is what did him in at the end, as he also knew.

Sorry that was so long, but I want to capture it all in case the Standard pulls it down.

Two Links and a Funny Picture

Monday, January 13, 2003   |  0 Comments

Two interesting articles worth sharing. In the first, "Long Live the Estate Tax!" Bill Gates, Sr. and Chuck Collins argue that reforming the estate tax laws will help soothe growing budget deficits and, more importantly, slow America's slide into a second Gilded Age. The last few paragraphs are really interesting:

Proposals to reform the tax have been blocked since 2000 by the "all or nothing" repeal lobby, which understands the peril of not having smaller estates as camouflage. Once exemptions rise above $3 million, it becomes impossible to find a credible and photogenic farmer or restaurant owner who will complain about what opponents call the "death tax." It's hard enough to find them now. The pro-repeal American Farm Bureau was asked to produce an example of a farmer who had lost a farm because of the estate tax. It could not identify a single one.

Lost in this debate are the benefits to our country of maintaining an estate tax. Originally passed in 1916, the estate tax was a fundamentally American response to the excesses of the Gilded Age. Populist reformers labored for the three decades before 1916 to pass federal income and estate taxes in order to shift the tax burden, mostly in the form of nineteenth-century tariff duties and excise taxes, off of Midwestern and Southern farm states and onto the wealthy Northeastern states. But underlying the movement for an estate tax was a recognition that too much concentrated wealth and power was putting our democracy at risk. We had fought a revolution to reject hereditary political and economic power--and the dizzying inequalities of the Gilded Age violated a fundamental American ideal of equality of opportunity.

We are now in a second Gilded Age. Instead of taking steps that would strengthen our democracy, we're heading backward to the wealth inequalities of a century ago. We need to preserve the estate tax in states and at the federal level for exactly the reason it is under assault. In a democracy, we should be offended when the power of concentrated wealth brazenly attempts to shape the terms of policy debate and dictate the rules of our society.

In the other, "So, Now Bigger Is Better?" David Broder points out the discrepencies between Bush's campaign promises — "you can't be for big government and big bureaucracy and still be for the little guy" — and the current situation:

That was then. Now that Bush is running the federal government, its size doesn't bother him so much. Two years after taking office, Bush is presiding over the biggest, most expensive federal government in history. He has created a mammoth Cabinet department, increased federal spending, imposed new federal rules on local and state governments, and injected federal requirements into every public school in America.

When I read pieces like this, I actually feel sympathy for folks like Pat Buchanan, traditional conservatives with real conservative values. What I don't get is the public support of Bush's measures by everyday Republicans, who tend to tout him as a second coming of Reagan. At least Reagan had vision. Broder's piece seems fairly well-balanced to me: he readily admits that at least one-third of our expanding budget can be attributed to "war on terror" costs and that America is now paying for many of Clinton's initiatives. He handles Bush's muddled education policy well, though, and also takes some well-deserved jabs at the Homeland Security Department.

Speaking of homeland security, my friend Doug put this graphic together. In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: It's funny 'cause it's true.

Song of the Moment

Friday, January 10, 2003   |  0 Comments

Frank Zappa's Apostrophe is required listening for me on road trips. It's like a short vacation inside Robert Crumb's head. You've got huskies whizzing in the snow, fur trappers beating up baby seals, St. Alphonzo serving up pancakes, and, well, Nanook. On one trip — I think I was driving from Destin to Tallahasee — I listened to it four times back-to-back, losing myself in a bizarre, cinematic reverie all the while. I really wanted to film the whole album — sort of a Cheech & Chong meets Terry Gilliam thing. Someday.

This version of "Cosmik Debris" is from The Best Band You Never Heard in Your Life, featuring a full horn section and a fantastic guitar solo. I love this version for a lot of reasons, but mostly because at one point someone changes a lyric and gets Zappa laughing. If you don't get the "Ring of Fire" jokes, pick up the album, which includes a cover that would make Johnny Cash . . . um . . . actually, I have no idea how he'd respond . . . but I'd like to watch.

Miscellaneous Debris

Wednesday, January 08, 2003   |  0 Comments

According to a recent report by the U.N., our impending war with Iraq will place about 10 million Iraqi citizens, many of them already homeless and refugees, at risk of starvation and disease. War will also disrupt continuing U.N. efforts to distribute clean drinking water and other basic necessities, a process already hampered by American-led sanctions. As many as 24 million Iraqis will be affected by breaks in the food supply chain.

I'm not sure how to reconcile those facts with things like this: JC Penny's "World Peace Keepers Battle Station," available for only $24.95 and suitable for ages 3 and up. A friend sent me a link to this set and others like it a few months ago, but I wasn't adequately stunned by it all until last week, when I watched Ed Helms make fun of them on The Daily Show. (Click "Gift Analyst Ed Helms reviews the hot gift items of the season" under Ed's photo to see the segment.) This is a really confusing world.

I've enjoyed getting feedback to the mix CD I posted a few days ago. Apparently several readers are offering mixes of their own in trade. How cool is that? People who have only "met" electronically are actually driving to post offices all across North America and shipping CDs to each other. Want to participate?

Finally, I was asked to put together one of those "Year in Review" pieces for Senses of Cinema. I'm not sure if they'll publish mine considering how few of 2002's most important films I've seen, but here's my response:

For me, 2002 will be most remembered for the Actors Theatre’s production of Angels in America, which I saw while visiting Phoenix in October and which only qualifies for a mention here because if Mike Nichols’s rumored seven hour adaptation of the plays captures even half of the magic and the joy of Tony Kushner’s language then it will surely be the best film I see in 2003. I spent the rest of the year, though, here in Knoxville, TN with its two screens devoted to interesting fare, leaving me grossly ill-equipped to make sweeping generalizations about the year in movies. (Ask me again in ten months.) Instead, here are some impressions of the 2002 film experiences that still linger.

The only film that I watched three days in a row, more enraptured by it each time, was Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There? The magic of the film for me is found in Lu Yi-ching’s performance. In this remarkable woman, a widow experiencing the mysteries of mourning and loss, Tsai has offered a counterargument to all who would summarily dismiss his films as simply Antonioni-like laments of alienation. What Time was also the most beautiful film I saw all year, featuring brilliant camera work from Benoît Delhomme.

My favorite sequence from any film was buried in the middle of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. Adam Sandler’s Barry Egan stands before his dream woman, Emily Watson, while the rest of his world collapses around him. A screaming telephone harasses him, a forklift crashes, and the voices of his coworkers conspire in a cacophony of fits and shrieks. I actually laughed out loud during the scene, partly as a temporary reprieve from the tension, partly out of sheer admiration for Anderson’s gifts. Punch-Drunk Love earns my “outstanding sound design” award for 2002. Hitchcock would have loved it.

The most consistently entertaining film I saw was Roger Moore’s Bowling for Columbine, which manages to be both provocative and surprisingly even-handed. Setting out to discover why we Americans are so good at shooting each other, Moore finally offers few concrete answers but succeeds in undercutting the most commonly held misconceptions, by conservatives and liberals alike. Moore still struggles occasionally to balance his earnest concern with parody, but the film makes a quality statement. Bowling is worth seeing for its interview with Charlton Heston alone—the most cringe-inducing moment in a film littered with cringe-inducing moments.

The film experience that I most cherish from this year was getting to sit beside my parents for a screening of Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, which was sponsored by the Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts and accompanied by the Annapolis Chorale’s performance of Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light. My parents had never seen Passion, or anything like it. Their silence as we walked through the hushed crowd toward our car is testament, I think, to the sublime majesty of Dreyer’s film.

And finally, a short list of films that I saw for the first time in 2002 and that made me a better man for it: Au Hasard Balthazar (Bresson), La Promesse (Dardenne), Through a Glass Darkly (Bergman), Good Men, Good Women (Hou), Waking Life (Linklater), The Children of Paradise (Carne), and Dancer in the Dark (Von Trier).

Tarkovsky and Sandwiches

Tuesday, January 07, 2003   |  0 Comments

I spent my lunch hour (and then some) sitting around a table with the senior pastor of a Presbyterian church, the priest of a local Orthodox congregation, and three other laymen (for lack of a better word). We were brought together by several strokes of remarkably good fortune, the intricacies of which would take much too long to explain here. The long and short of it, though, is that we got together to talk about a movie.

Not just any movie, mind you, but one of the best, Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev — that poetic, mystical, transcendant biopic of the 15th century Russian icon painter. Rublev was the first Tarkovsky film that I saw, and I'm still feeling the consequences. That I'm even posting to this site can be attributed directly to that viewing and to the awakening that it inspired in me.

Last fall I spent nearly three months preparing and leading discussions of the arts with a group of friends from my church. The experience was at times frustrating, at times beautiful. What I soon realized was how muddied the discourse of faith/religion and art/creativity is. I'm not sure what exactly I mean by "muddied," except that it seems to get at some of the dogmatic biases that hinder productive communication between peoples of differing theological bents. I honestly believe that art — or any medium, really, through which God reveals His presence in immediate, often non-verbal ways — can serve the reconciliation of His church. But until I led those discussions, I never knew how tricky a proposition it could be.

What I found most gratifying about today's meeting was the generosity of all involved — the obvious sense that we were gathering for a communal and (I use this word with some hesitation) sacred experience. Perhaps that is ultimately testament to Tarkovsky's genius. He strove throughout his career to capture on film images that would force viewers to experience complex and contradictory emotions and, in the process, to be rendered capable of spiritual improvement. As we spoke — and we certainly spoke more about God than about the film — I was reminded often of how well he had succeeded. Instead of debating the particulars of plot developments or performances or special effects, as is often the case when Americans gather to talk movies, we struggled to make sense of the lingering emotions and longings that Rublev had wrestled from us. A friend calls this "creational theology" — the desire to better understand the mysteries of God by studying his revelation.

I hope to have a full response to Rublev up by the end of the week. After being online for just over a year now, I guess it's about time that I tried to write about the site's inspiration.

January Mix

Saturday, January 04, 2003   |  0 Comments

With the purchse of our new computer, we have entered the 21st century with all its new-fangled technology. Which is why it was only yesterday — after deciding to take the day off or risk my head exploding from the tedium that is my day job — that I was able to finally go digging through my music collection in search of a mix CD. Soon after I finished (four hours after I began), I flipped on the tube and caught a commercial for the upcoming "broadcast television premiere" of High Fidelity. Where's Alanis Morissette when you need her?

So in the interest of . . . well, I can't actually think of a reason that this would be of interest to anyone, but here's the playlist:

• "Getting Married" Sam Phillips
• "This Mess We're In" P.J. Harvey
• "Try Not To Breathe" R.E.M.
• "I've Seen It All" Bjork
• "God Rest His Soul" The 31st of February *
• "Widow's Walk" Suzanne Vega
• "I Need You Like a Drug" They Eat Their Own
• "Faces in Disguise" Sunny Day Real Estate
• "Northern Sky" Nick Drake
• "North Dakota" Lyle Lovett
• "Mount Washington" Beth Orton
• "Past the Mission" Tori Amos
• "Round the Bend" Beck
• "Into the Mystic" Van Morrison
• "5&1/2 Minute Hallway" Poe
• "No Way Out" Peter Gabriel
• "love is more thicker than forget" The Story

"North Dakota," which has always been one of my favorite songs, was a last-second replacement for "One More Colour" by Sarah Polley and Mychael Danna (from The Sweet Hereafter soundtrack), and I'm starting to regret the move. I needed something a little more up-tempo to get from Nick Drake to Beth Orton. All in all, a great little collection, though. I've always had a thing for driving around by myself on those first warm days of spring, preferably around dusk and with the windows down. This CD will make a great companion for those trips.

Feel free to pass along your favorite mixes. I'm always looking for good music.

* The 31st of February was an early incarnation of the Allman Brothers. "God Rest His Soul" can be found on the first disc of their Dreams boxset.

Two Quick Links

Thursday, January 02, 2003   |  0 Comments

A quick entry today to pass along two links:

The first is to Robert Scheer's latest column at The Nation. In "No Room for Logic in Bush Foreign Policy," he steps sure-footed through the oxymoronic morass that is America's current foreign policy, before concluding:

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration remains detached from the destabilizing Israeli-Palestinian nightmare, is struggling to gain footing against Al Qaeda and is apparently indifferent to the successes of Muslim fundamentalism in Chechnya, Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine and Pakistan.

Instead, we are mobilizing our massive forces against a weakened secular dictator 6,000 miles away who doesn't seem to have had anything to do with a series of devastating terrorist attacks.

What is happening here? Certainly not the construction of a coherent foreign policy aimed at increasing the security of the United States or our allies.

This is an Administration that in two years has so mucked up our approach to the world that merely applying the demands of logic is made to appear unpatriotic.

Here's the other link, which will take you to my response to Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly. Enjoy. And Happy New Year!

Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

Thursday, January 02, 2003   |  0 Comments

Dir. by Ingmar Bergman

Images: As in most of Bergman’s b&w films, the interplay of darkness and light is a critical motif here, as seen most obviously in the images of Karin’s outstretched arms in the hull of the shipwreck and in her decision to wear sunglasses near the end of the film. The light motif is also realized in Bergman’s frequent shots of windows that open onto a distant horizon across the sea. My favorite instance comes after a bedroom exchange between Karin and Martin, when she turns her back to him, and the camera pans slowly to the right, fixing its gaze on the setting sun. The film is also notable for its strangely erotic subtext, created by a number of shots, among them: David’s hand on Karin’s shoulder as she drifts off to sleep; the stationary, low-angle shots of Karin alone in the wallpapered room; and, of course, the charged encounters between Karin and Minus.

See Also: Winter Light | Cries and Whispers

• • •

The first of Bergman’s chamber dramas, Through a Glass Darkly concerns a family vacationing on the Baltic island of Fårö, where their alienation from one another is mirrored in the bleak landscape that surrounds them. The patriarch, David (Gunnar Bjornstrand), is a widower and best-selling novelist, whose life is marked solely by professional ambition and emotional detachment. His daughter, Karin (Harriet Andersson), is a schizophrenic plagued by rapturous voices that promise the imminent return of God. She is tended by her husband, Martin (Max Von Sydow), and by her younger brother, Minus (Lars Passgard), neither of whom is capable of offering her lasting comfort. Not surprisingly, Bergman constructs the film so as to allow his players to ruminate on his chief, career-long concerns: the struggle with inspiration in the life of an artist, the silence of God, and the potential redemption afforded by human love.

To begin at the end . . .

In the film’s final scene, David stands with his son before an open window, their faces mostly lost in shadow. Shaken by his sister’s most recent collapse and her subsequent evacuation by helicopter, Minus laments his loss of faith in God and man. The world has suddenly become torn open for the teenager, exposing its existential horror, and he can no longer imagine his place in it. “Give me a proof of God,” he begs of his father. David responds:

I can only give you an indication of my own hope. It’s knowing that love exists for real in the human world. . . . The highest and lowest, the most ridiculous and the most sublime. All kinds. . . . I don’t know whether love is proof of God’s existence, or if love is God. . . . Suddenly the emptiness turns into abundance, and hopelessness into life. It’s like a reprieve, Minus, from a sentence of death.

If we are to think of Through a Glass Darkly in musical terms, as Bergman encourages us to do, then David’s speech is a coda that resolves on a picardy third — that often surprising, but seldom satisfying moment when a piece in a minor key ends on a major chord. It’s one of only a very few instances in Bergman’s films that rings hollow to me. It feels, in fact, like a near desperate attempt to mask over the more honestly realized anguish and suffering that characterize the eighty minutes preceding. That the director was able to more satisfactorily resolve the problem a decade later in Cries and Whispers is perhaps evidence that here his ideas are still gestating, not yet fully formed.

What Bergman does get absolutely right in Through a Glass Darkly, though, is the very real horror of the existential crisis, the moment when Camus’s Sisyphus pauses, watching his stone roll once again down the mountain. In the penultimate sequence, Karin returns to the upstairs bedroom where, throughout the film, we have watched her communicate with the imagined harbingers of God’s return. Perhaps inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, Karin’s delusional conversations are mediated by the room’s tattered wallpaper and are charged (as is much of the film) with a discomforting eroticism. When David and Martin discover her, Karin is ecstatic, her glazed eyes fixed on the door through which God will soon appear. In a beautifully rendered scene, she falls to her knees and asks her stoic husband to join her. Von Sydow’s remarkable face is a conflicted mess of sorrow and love and humiliation and desire. But he kneels beside her, impotent in his attempts to calm her as she waits.

What follows is one of film’s most terrifying moments: God’s arrival in the form of the ambulatory helicopter, greeted by a grotesque dance of fits and shrieks from Karin. She throws her body into a corner, howling in agony and recoiling at the advances of her family, who look on, hopeless. If the finale of Carl Dreyer’s Ordet is a cinematic document of genuine Christian faith, then Karin’s rapture is its funhouse mirror reflection: a hopeless portrait of abject nihilism. Once calmed and quieted, Karin describes what she saw:

The door opened, but the god was a spider. He came up to me and I saw his face. It was a terrible, stony face. He scrambled up and tried to penetrate me, but I defended myself. All along I saw his eyes. They were cold and calm. When he couldn’t penetrate me, he continued up my chest, up into my face and onto the wall. I have seen God.

Camus demands that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy” — that in his very recognition of life’s absurdity Sisyphus has made a heroic gesture toward freedom — but Bergman, except in the aforementioned coda, refuses to offer even that promise. Karin puts on her sunglasses, shutting out the light that she has quite literally and so desperately sought throughout the film, and willingly surrenders herself to the medics. Despite David’s closing words, and the apparent reconciliation with Minus that they engender, I experience little catharsis from the film, knowing that Karin’s surrender is complete and, ultimately, fatal.

Strangely, it’s Karin’s plight, and that of so many like her in Bergman’s films, that draws me again and again to his work. There is, in that dramatization of the existential crisis, something of what Christian aesthetician Frank Burch Brown calls “negative transcendence”: “God appears only as the Absent One, as that which is signified only by the depth of the artfully expressed yearning.” I’ve become quite fond of that concept, applying it repeatedly to Bergman and sharing it often with friends who are struggling to make sense of their admiration for supposedly Godless films like Magnolia. In Through a Glass Darkly, I think, Bergman stages that crisis more brutally than anywhere in his canon, and the film is better for it.

2003 Film Diary

Wednesday, January 01, 2003   |  0 Comments

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