Failed States

From "Exposure" by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, The New Yorker, 3/24/2008:

The image of Gilligan achieves its power from the fact that it does not show the human form laid bare and reduced to raw matter but creates instead an original image of inhumanity that admits no immediately self-evident reading. Its fascination resides, in large part, in its mystery and inscrutability—in all that is concealed by all that it reveals. It is an image of carnival weirdness: this upright body shrouded from head to foot; those wires; that pose; and the peaked hood that carries so many vague and ghoulish associations. The pose is obviously contrived and theatrical, a deliberate invention that appears to belong to some dark ritual, a primal scene of martyrdom. The picture transfixes us because it looks like the truth, but, looking at it, we can only imagine what that truth is: torture, execution, a scene staged for the camera? So we seize on the figure of Gilligan as a symbol that stands for all that we know was wrong at Abu Ghraib and all that we cannot—or do not want to—understand about how it came to this.

Intelligent Design

Crayon Physics Deluxe

The Omega Man and Omega Man's Best Friend

We can work it out

The first hour of I Am Legend is an awesome story about Will Smith and his dog Sam tooling around an abandoned Manhattan in rad cars, hunting antelope and trapping vampires for medical experiments. The remainder is sub-28 Days Later "last best hope for humanity" melodramatic pap. Smith is the main attraction here, giving what is perhaps his best performance as a man constantly fending off the terror of being utterly alone in the world by thrusting himself into the futile labor of trying to find a cure for the disease that has turned the scintilla of humanity who didn't expire straight away into a horde of rabid zombie/vampires that prey on the even smaller scintilla who were entirely immune. Unfortunately the filmmakers, who invest a great deal of time building an engrossing atmosphere of isolation coupled with desperation, decide to sabotage their story with a particularly glaring deus ex machina, turning I Am Legend's climax into Panic Room: The Cliffs Notes. I suppose that insofar as Will Smith-starring adaptations of 1950s classic sci-fi novels, it's far better than the atrocious I, Robot.

Brand New Order

Cut Copy's long awaited follow-up to 2004's slept-on Bright Like Neon Love is slated to drop in the United States on April 8th courtesy of Modular. Knowing that you can't (or shouldn't want to) wait that long, and seeking to deny leakers the moral high ground, the band have posted In Ghost Colours for streaming in its entirety over at their MySpace. It's sort of a shamelessly brilliant/brilliantly shameless rip of New Order at their most rock-centric, and it's destined to be one of the most nakedly pleasurable pop albums of 2008.

Addendum: Cut Copy have also posted an mp3 of their So Cosmic mix, which I suppose serves as a kind of prologue for the upcoming album. Download it from their blog, complete with annotated tracklisting.

L'Arc de Triomphe

Alt.Country

We're here-ere!

Hipster farmers: "Their Carhartts are no longer ironic. Now they have real dirt on them." Probably the finest match between insufferable journalism and the infuriating focus thereof I've yet encountered, from the newspaper that just broke the story on Brooklyn: indie rock enclave.

All-Girl Death Squad

Don't leave me hanging on the telephone

Los Angeles is, as has been oft-remarked recently, fertile ground for rock and roll these days: there's the murmur-punk of No Age, the bracing no-wave of Health, and the wiry feminist proto-punk of Mika Miko. The five women who make up Miko just tore apart the South by Southwest festival to several favorable notices, but they're far from new: the first album, C.Y.S.L.A.B.F., has been out on Kill Rock Stars since July 2006, and they released the 666 EP on Post Present Medium back in March '07. The RIYL here is going to be the lo-fi sloppy-core of Black Lips, Times New Viking, and Jay Reatard, with the caveat that Miko are far, far more vicious, and ergo, far, far better.

Mika Miko Myspace

Carnival of Souls

The human impulse when confronted with something that appears to be a puzzle is to attempt to solve it. This tendency presupposes that all puzzles have a single correct solution, and that all things that appear to be puzzles are, in fact, puzzles. Such is the frustration underlying Alain Resnais' controversial 1961 film, L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), the very point of which appears to be to confound and undermine these ingrained expectations.

The film's premise is thus: a man (Giorgio Albertazzi, billed as 'X') meets a woman (Delphine Seyrig, billed as 'A') while staying at an opulent chateau in Marienbad, a spa town in the former Czechoslovakia. 'X' believes that he has met 'A' the previous year, and that she had then promised to leave her husband for him; she demurs, claiming not to remember him. A second man, 'M' (Sacha Pitoeff ), who may or may not be 'A's husband, looms over the proceedings with oblique menace. From there the film appears to be a study of the nature of objectivity and memory, with scenes repeating over and over with slight variations: a fireplace will be on the other side of a room, with a landscape hanging over the mantle rather than a mirror; a feathered dressing gown transforms into a black evening gown; a diagram of the hotel grounds is subtly altered. Certain motifs, however, are prominent: a parlor game is played over and over again; an ambiguous statue's meaning is bruited about; and the hotel's endless corridors and doorways are invoked in a seemingly looped voice-over, perhaps as a metaphor for the film's nightmarishly infinite feel.

What actually happens in Marienbad is both unknowable and immaterial; it is the first, and perhaps best example of a film defying our desire for narrative, definite storytelling and instead aiming directly for a visceral emotional response. To attempt to "solve" the movie is ultimately beside the point. Resnais and his screenwriter, the avant-garde novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet (an excellent New York Times profile is here), have created a kind of surrealist horror film, mining the same deep vein of existential dread as latter-day abstractionist David Lynch, upon whose work Marienbad is an undeniably profound influence. The events of the film as we see them are disquieting enough - there is a possible murder - but the presentation is so feverish, so obtuse, that it evokes a concurrent blend of bewilderment, claustrophobia, and déjà vu.

Last Year at Marienbad is currently playing a limited return engagement at Film Forum (209 W. Houston Street). The trailer may be viewed here.

"The never-fail appliance for glamorizing malaise"

Robert Bechtle, Six Houses on Mound Street, 2006. Oil on canvass

Peter Schjeldahl has a wonderful write up of the Whitney Biennial over in the pages of the current New Yorker. (Or, at least I assume he does, as I haven't yet perused my print edition; look, I'm all for access, but isn't being able to read each complete issue of The New Yorker for free on the internet a slap in the face to us paying subscribers? Ultimately I'm shelling out for the Table of Contents, ads for things I generally can't afford, and the cartoons. And I just renewed. Goddamn it. Anyway:)

Up front, my knowledge of the fine arts is sorely deficient; I, like most cavemen, assess objets d'art on a purely visual basis, without much regard for, or foreknowledge of, their larger historical context. So my interest here isn't in the art (which I haven't yet had an opportunity to see), but how Schjeldahl writes about it, which I am simply suggesting, in a rather roundabout fashion, you read. Behold:

...this Biennial is remarkably free of forced ideas, despite an occasional appeal to ecological virtue. It is full of busy ingenuities that smack of art school—but of art-school studios, not seminars. Two decades of academic postmodernizing have trailed off into embarrassed silence...

There isn’t a lot in the show to like very much, but the over-all tenor puts me in mind of the “aridity” that, according to another exigent author, John of the Cross, is a key stage in the “dark night of the soul,” preceding redemption. Even if little comes of it, the drama of this state—a sort of exasperated modesty—will etch the 2008 Biennial in memory...

Sharply surprising is the inclusion of taciturn paintings of benumbingly ordinary suburban streets by the finest of the first-generation photo-realists, Robert Bechtle, whose style has hardly varied in more than forty years. But take their philosophical measure: a stony refusal to believe that we ever know what we see, put to a test of things—dull houses, parked cars—that seem too obvious to merit even passing attention. Like a struck tuning fork, Bechtle’s skepticism finds harmonic vibrations in works by young artists of otherwise unrelated sorts....

And so forth. How can you not want to see this thing? And how could it possibly live up, in your mind, to these lush descriptions and insights?

The Whitney Biennial runs from March 6 through June 1 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue. Admission is $15, with pay-what-you-wish admission from 6-9pm on Fridays. (From March 6 to March 23, the Biennial will extend to the Park Avenue Armory [at 67th Street] with further installations; admission free.) The Biennial's website is here; and the Whitney's, uh, Facebook page is here.

Bubble Yum

Mmmm jellybeans

Apart from LCD Soundsystem, the DFA had been up to deceptively little of note until lately. Between 2002 and 2005, the label/production team released a steady stream of seminal 12-inches and albums, including, but not limited to "House of Jealous Lovers", "Losing My Edge", "Cone Toaster", "Yeah", their remix of Le Tigre's "Decepticon", Echoes, and DFA Compilation #2. Yet, despite their enduring prestige, a quick page through the DFA's discography of late reveals a pair of (admittedly excellent) vault-clearing remix compilations, Hot Chip's à chacun son goût new LP, Made in the Dark, and two fairly disappointing high-profile remixes (Justin Timberlake's "My Love" and M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes").

That's why it is extremely heartening that recent times have seen two DFA releases that go a long way towards resolving the label's burgeoning identity crisis. These are Hercules & Love Affair's self-titled debut and the latest 12-inch from The Juan MacLean, "Happy House". Both veer away from the krautrock, pathos, and irony trail blazed by the flagship act and find a warm, organic center; the pendulum swings back towards the "disco" and away from the "punk". H&LA, the nom de guerre of Brooklyn's Andy Butler, is the first DFA act to fully embrace Paradise Garage-era disco qua disco, resulting in a sound that Nick Sylvester accurately encapsulated as "straight-up gay." It alternates between rapturous house anthems and quasi torch songs, marrying early-oughts live-sounding (or possibly live) percussion and hand claps with the strongest vocal presence (again, discounting Mr. Murphy) on a DFA release since Luke Jenner tried to appropriate the top of Robert Smith's vocal range on those original Rapture singles. This is primarily thanks to the efforts of Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons) whose diva potential is fully realized here, as opposed to on My Robot Friend's restrained, under-orchestrated "One More Try"; his vocal performance nearly overpowers the excellent "Blind", which is no mean feat.

The Juan MacLean, a.k.a. John MacLean (formerly of Six Finger Satellite) is a DFA O.G. who constantly operated out of the (relative) limelight; in the beginning he rubbed shoulders with the considerably more fêted Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, and Black Dice. In 2005 he released his debut album Less Than Human which spawned a trio of excellent-yet-underheard tracks, "Give Me Every Little Thing", "Tito's Way", and "Love is in the Air". I don't know whether or not it would be appropriate to call MacLean the "housiest" member of the DFA stable; he's certainly the artist who hewed closest to dance music's existing template (whereas his better-known labelmates were more instrumental in expanding it). "Happy House", as the title suggests, fits squarely within this aesthetic: centered around a infectious piano figure and co-writer Nancy Whang's appropriately femme anonyme vocal, the 12+ minute track is concerned only with propulsion and hedonism, which here are conjoined pursuits. Todd L. Burns has a more thoughtful run down of the title track and its accompanying remixes over at Resident Advisor; one specific "Easter Egg surprise" I'd like to direct you to is the cowbell.

Hercules & Love Affair Myspace
The Juan MacLean Myspace

I Put Myself In This Position

Letter From Your Future Past

From "The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer" by Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker, 12/10/2007:

Spitzer’s tenure as a state attorney general may be the most heavily chronicled of any in America’s history. He reimagined the office, inserting it into the void left by a general regulatory retreat by the federal government. He regarded his activism as a logical and just extension of a new states’-rights movement, which had been conceived as an attempt to roll back oversight and advance a conservative, laissez-faire agenda, but which Spitzer interpreted as an invitation to state-led intercession and prosecutorially mandated policy change. With great gusto, he went after big polluters, pharmaceutical companies, gun manufacturers, and, most notably, the financial industry, where various harmful and fraudulent practices had taken root—insincere equity research, shady market timing, bid rigging. As many saw it, Spitzer’s modus operandi was to build a case against his targets, then push the most egregious allegations in the media, which put unbearable public pressure on the targets to settle. And settle they almost invariably did. Spitzer earned an impressive array of scalps, admirers, headlines, and plaudits for reform, as well as a coterie of powerful enemies, whose indignation toward his media manipulations, disproportionate tactics, and occasionally shallow understanding of their businesses tended to be drowned out by the widespread public disgust engendered by their greed.

Brooke Masters, in “Spoiling for a Fight,” her 2006 biography of Spitzer, meticulously recapitulates each prosecution—the regulatory turf battles, the legal dekes and dodges, the mutating rationales—creating a portrait of a righteous and far from infallible crusader employing every tactical advantage that his office makes available to him. He does not always come off well. (All the same, his parents have the book on the coffee table at their house in Rye.) His detractors tend to complain that the press created Eliot Spitzer—that the Sheriff of Wall Street, to use one moniker, was a fantasy of the liberal, wealth-resenting media. And so they take some satisfaction in the fact that the pendulum seems to have swung back on him, with so much force that you’d think it was spring-loaded.

Now I Wanna Be Your Madonna

Yesterday, Madonna was deservedly inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a paradoxical institution whose mission is to make Jann Wenner seem relevant. Rather than perform, the Material Girl requested that her songs be covered by fellow Michiganders The Stooges, who complied with renditions of "Burning Up" and "Ray of Light." Undoubtedly the above video of their set will be pulled down by Viacom posthaste, so enjoy it while you can.

Those Who Dwell In Glass Houses

Shortly after taking office, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer placed a now infamous phone call to the Assembly minority leader, Republican James Tedisco, referring to himself as "a fucking steamroller." That outburst, occasioned by the Assemblyman's criticisms over being left out of negotiations on an ethics bill, was the defining moment of Spitzer's year-old administration. It has served as both a sobriquet and an epithet, depending on whether the utterer admired the governor's signature no-nonsense, no quarter style or despised his particularly arrogant brand of self-righteousness. Had Spitzer someday realized the sweeping transformation of New York politics he promised when running for governor, it would have served as the cornerstone of his legend, and eventually, his epitaph. Now it is a cat-call.

Spitzer was today connected with an international prostitution ring, captured on a federal wiretap arranging for the services of a high-priced call girl while in Washington, D.C. last month. In a brief press conference at his Manhattan office, the governor apologized to his family and the public, citing only "a personal matter"; he did not deny the prostitution story, first reported by the New York Times. For a man who has positioned himself as a tireless crime fighter above reproach, the accusation is ruinous. It exposes Spitzer as a pious hypocrite, setting a stringently high standard of conduct for others while flouting the law in brazenly lurid fashion himself. His credibility is destroyed, and his ability to govern effectively is probably beyond repair.

Spitzer's greatest antagonist, the Republican Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, will live to fight another day. It was Bruno, a legislative maneuverer of the old school (incidentally not without legal problems of his own), who most spectacularly stood up to the Steamroller, using his leadership position as a cudgel to bring Spitzer's agenda to a grinding halt. Furthermore, it was the majority leader who was inadvertently responsible for Spitzer's previous big stumble, his staff's improper leaking of state police records concerning Bruno's possibly inappropriate use of state aircraft for political travel. Yet, despite Bruno's best efforts, Spitzer was closing in on the G.O.P. Senate majority, using his influence and control of the state Democratic Party's coffers to narrow the gap in the upper house to one seat. Just yesterday he appeared poised to unify the state government under Democratic control for the first time since the Great Depression; that grand political project, which would have drastically altered the landscape of the New York politics and perhaps given the governor the requisite clout to remake Albany in his image, is now deferred at best and dead at worst.

I expect that Spitzer will do the honorable thing and resign. It is this end he seemed to foreshadow in his comments today, saying, "I do not believe that politics in the long run is about individuals. It is about ideas, the public good, and doing what is best for the state of New York." By failing to live up to his own ideals in such a spectacular fashion, he has done potentially irreparable damage to the project he personified, and betrayed the trust of millions of New Yorkers who invested their hope for desperately needed change in him. Falling on his sword is the least he can do.

A Bullet to the Head

The Brave One does for right-to-carry enthusiasts what 24 does for torture boosters: provides a fictive context in which their arguments, invalidated by reality, ring 100% true. Unlike Taxi Driver, another film concerning vigilantism and featuring Jodie Foster, The Brave One pretends to ask complicated questions, but is ultimately ambivalent about the moral and ethical conundrum supposedly at its core, allowing Foster's character - an NPR reporter (shorthand, you see, for her initial naivety, er, I mean, liberalism) - to strut and fret vis a vis her ultraviolent freelancing while making sure that the audience is never less that 110% on her side the entire time. A rogue's gallery of '70s era urban baddies - muggers, murderers, would-be rapists - get dispatched with a simple pull of the trigger, and who could possibly have a problem with that? Watching these carefully choreographed scenes from the comfortable omnipotence of my couch, I know that these scumbags deserve precisely what they got, and I don't feel the least bit "complicit", which is how I'm sure the filmmakers, who likely believe themselves to be raising "difficult" questions and issues, wanted me to feel.

Rather than turning the Death Wish formula on its head, The Brave One merely updates it. Sure, the muggers are back in Central Park, and the subways are again a lawless netherworld, but this time, instead of some kid getting his Walkman ripped off, he loses an iPod.