Political Rant III.

Some people have pointed out my negative concerns regarding Sarah Palin, and have asked me why I couldn't find something positive to say regarding her.

So let me say this, the positive aspect of Sarah Palin's candidacy.

Levi Johnston is the finest piece of ass involved in a political families sexual peccadilloes in quite some time.

There.

Also, here's some thoughts from Whoopi Goldberg.

At the movies: The Exiles.

Kent Johnson’s 1961 film The Exiles is finally receiving a proper theatrical release, and it’s thanks to filmmakers Sherman Alexie (Smoke Signals) and Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep) that it’s happening. A jazzy (music by The Revels) and mournful trek through twelve hours in the lives a dozen Natives-turned-Angelenos, the film is steeped in vital, kinetic slices of life and pieces of interior monologue, and the disconnect between ideal and actuality is a sharp and serrated gulf. The visual sensibility on display here is astonishing, using high-contrast black-and-white photography to make the streets and sidewalks of Los Angeles into Caravaggio paintings, chiaroscuro portals into absolute darkness next to glittering prizes and ‘open all night’ signs.

The film is a time capsule twice over, documenting both the stories of countless Natives (though that aimless alienation that comes from living in the big city can be quite universal) and providing a visual history of a part of Los Angeles that simply doesn’t exist anymore. As the first, the film can’t help but suffer for its attention to the anomie and alcoholic cycle which most of its characters are stuck in; happy stories don’t normally drive insightful film. But as the latter, The Exiles is a marvel. There is a rawness, a swinging and suppurating energy to its scenes that threaten to break out of the screen, and in its way, Los Angeles itself is as much a character as any of the Native principals.

The Exiles doesn’t claim to offer any solutions to the travails that Native Americans face, nor should it be required to. But there’s a question floating in the ether, one that has been there since the film was made and which has not become any less relevant in the near fifty years since; what can be done? There’s a film coming out next week called Frozen River that also tells some Native American stories, stories of human trafficking, casinos, and crippling poverty. Both films are going to be difficult sells, because most people don’t like to think about Native American issues.

Maybe it’s unresolved guilt, or, as most usually say, the desire for escapism and entertainment at the movies that feed this impulse. But The Exiles is not a lecture. It is an experience, one that resonates long after the film has unrolled and the lights come up. And its ultimate sequence, as sunrise finds a group of young Natives leaving the hillside site of a drunken gathering/dance/council/brawl, echoes that perspective. The cars drive away, the participants creep home, and other than some debris, a little blood, a lot of cigarette butts, and a few tears, there’s nothing left to mark the land. But they were there, and for a little while, at least, it was theirs.

At the movies: Make-Out with Violence.

So, my review for Make-Out with Violence got an actual URL, but, as usual, it's slashed down a bit.

So, here's my Director's Cut review. The film is playing at 6:45 and 8:30 PM at the Belcourt on Wednesday, September 10th, and I'd advise everyone to try and check it out.


MAKE-OUT WITH VIOLENCE

There’s an austere and bloody beauty to this film, a languid charm, and a deeply poetic sense of possibility. I’ve never seen anything quite like Make-Out with Violence, a locally-made marvel that tramples genre expectations while delivering interesting characters and a tangled net of believable and affecting relationships. This could have been a slice-of-life dramedy and worked beautifully; it could just as easily have been a straight-up splatterfest and left the most ravenous of audiences satiated. But the film finds its own path, and beautifully.

There’s a dash of Return of the Living Dead 3 here, skulking around in the background. Similarly, you can feel the open, implicitly southern laconic openness of David Gordon Green’s George Washington and All the Real Girls. But Make-Out with Violence is such a fully-realized original vision that the only thing I could honestly compare it to with any degree of authority is Sofia Coppola’s masterpiece The Virgin Suicides (there’s certainly a thematic echo there, but Make-Out is far less dreamy and more focused on the specifics of loss and desire). Whether you take the zombie story at the heart of the film as a literal exploration of what happens when love leaves and you’re left with only flesh, or if you’d rather see it as an extended metaphor for the Darling boys’ metabolizing their grief, there’s no denying that what The Deagol Brothers have put onscreen is like nothing else to come out of the city before, and moreso a staggeringly promising debut.

There’s a sense of community to these characters, and one of the film’s strengths is the way it allows all the different connections between characters to unfold organically, shading in the little details of the hearts being juggled at its center. Make-Out with Violence understands young love; how it transforms bodies, disrupts allegiances, turns friend and family against one another, and sometimes offers a way in- or a way out.

The horror and dramatic elements are in perfect balance (with only a couple of overly comic scenes breaking the film’s sensuous and hypnotic spell), and there’s a cumulative sense of haunting, literally and figuratively, that gains strength throughout, culminating with a finish that weaves shock, resignation, and a palpable lament for what was and what was lost. There’s a stark emotional truth at the center of the film that most movies, of any size or budget, just aren’t interested in exploring. But Make-Out with Violence can sit proudly alongside Black Snake Moan and The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things as examples of Tennessee filmmaking at its most uncompromising and enduring.

Political Rant II.

It just keeps getting deeper. And I'm not talking about the book-banning, the venal vindictive abuse of power, the lying, or the hypocritical and inconsistent religious perspective. I'm talking about allowing your special needs child to be used as a prop. Yes, the special needs child that she was so concerned about that she flew AFTER HER WATER BROKE. The special needs child who, at four months old, has no business being treated like a baton in a relay.

What I don't understand is how she can be a hardcore pro-life 'team mom' christian and shirk her wifely concerns to run for any kind of public office. Pick-and-choose christianity is one of my big pet peeves, but this really does seem more shameless than usual. And Jon Stewart, last night on The Daily Show, while talking to Newt Gingrich, pointed it out beautifully- Sarah Palin is a woman who doesn't believe in abortion, even in cases of rape or incest, yet in reference to her seventeen year-old daughter's pregnancy, she refers to it as "Bristol's decision." And decision is just another word for choice.

I am over 'do as I say, not as I do' attitudes amongst our elected officials. Sarah Palin is a shameless hypocrite, and I don't trust her for a second.


Also, much love to Julie Brown for her devastating take on SP on her website and YouTube. I still think Tina Fey is the ideal Palin, but I'm so glad to see Julie back and in action.

And remember, "In Alaska, “Hockey Mom” is code for “Arctic Meth Princess.”"

Forgotten dance classics: Kid 'n Play - "2 Hype."

Ah, the second summer of love. When Manchester's Hacienda was the tastemaking dance floor of choice for international sounds. Gaining ascendancy in the interim between Belgium's one-two punch of New Beat and techno, with acid house, hip-hop, and a lot of ecstasy playing nice together, it was a time of utter magic.

In the midst of that, you had all these American hip-hop artists getting remixed for the European dance market, and the end results were sometimes a mess and sometimes glorious. There's very little actual Kid or Play in Dancin' Danny D's House Mix, but the sounds are amazing (to be sampled themselves just a few years later in Altern 8's "Activ 8"). Luxuriate in it.

Political Rant I.

The more I try and wrap my mind around it, the only possible solution that I can come to is that John McCain is trying to pull some sort of Andy Kaufman performance art approach to his Presidential campaign, because the whole Sarah Palin pick strikes me as shameless and opportunistic, in the dumbest and most obvious of ways. For him to have built the entire linchpin of his campaign around how much more experience he has than Obama, then to turn around and pick a woman whom people in her own state call a glorified mayor- it’s either the height of hubris or some sort of shocking coup de grace for what was once a promising career.

There was a time when John McCain was a thorn in the side of everyone, a shrewd and volatile voice that was aiming for a bipartisan improvement of things in this country. This was a John McCain who refused to buy into the lockstep hypocrisies of evangelical Christianity, who had gay friends and who didn’t find same-sex marriage all that threatening at all. This was a man who got railroaded by George W. Bush during the ramp-up to the 2000 election. This was a man who was trying to change the face of the Republican party.

I knew it was over at the 2004 Republican convention, when he stood on stage with Bush, hugging the man who’d derailed his own campaign with some of the most ultra-Rovian tactics imaginable. That was the beginning of the end. He was hitching his horse to the way the wind was blowing, to continued war in Iraq, to obscene waste of the Federal budget, and to whatever reactionary Biblical pick-and-choose rules for society were endorsed by James Dobson and other jackals who’ve made the blind ignorance of their followers into their own personal empires. Mark my words- anyone who subscribes to Focus on the Family or feels that Sarah Palin is an icon of family values is not a follower of Christ. They follow their wallets, the fear that someone more powerful than they is watching, and whatever lets them feel good about their own lives and not rock the boat.

So I can’t muster up much respect for the poor shell of a man the Republicans have dredged up from the ditch George W. left him beat up and set on fire in eight years ago. He sold out, like most people do when the price is right. There’s only shame in that if you’ve tried to make your name and word of honor into something, and most people don’t. He did, and now it’s meaningless.

As for Sarah Palin, I feel nothing but contempt. She should never have accepted McCain’s offer of the Vice-Presidential nomination. The only good that will come from this debacle-in-the-making is that perhaps someone will finally get around into investigating the staggering amount of corruption that infests the state of Alaska. When she starts returning that $200,000,000 that was allocated for that state’s infamous ‘bridge to nowhere,’ then we’ll talk. When she explains how she can be a conservative, family values Christian woman who has currently put aside her four month-old special needs child to go run for Vice President, then we’ll talk. When she outlines a credible strategy for removing our troops from or entrenching them in Iraq, then we’ll talk. But for now, all I see is a pretty face who’s in way over her head. She may make it through this election without having too much dirty laundry spilled, but I don’t think that’ll be the case. And I don’t wish that on her; we’ve all got secrets we’re not too proud of.

My dog dropped out of this race a long way back. If someone asks me what kind of candidate represents my values, that’s easy- Dennis Kucinich all the way. But Dennis is a bit much for some people. Fine. So I have to look at who all is in the running and proceed accordingly. I’d like to think that I’m willing to cut people some slack when necessary. So I don’t think that either the Republican or Democratic nominees will willingly provoke conflict with another nation any time soon. Some would say this makes me naïve, but our resources are stretched way too think for any rational person to consider that. Again, some would say that I’m showing my own weaknesses by assuming that any of our prospective nominees can demonstrate consistent rationality. But that’s where I’m proceeding from.

Ending the War is a big thing for me. Health care reform needs to happen, and fast. The erosion of the separation between church and state needs to stopped, and the ideal way to do it is to tax churches. More money needs to go toward education than anything else. There’s no reason why climate crisis and non-petroleum fuel solutions can’t be part of our daily routine, and there’s no reason why science should be stymied by how a monolithic group has chosen to interpret ancient narratives. Abortion is not an easy choice, but until every child in this country can be cared for and nurtured and loved, it is a necessary option. The insurance racket needs to be gutted and reconceptualized. Discrimination against people for stupid reasons needs to stop. People without money are just as important as people with money, and it’s time we found a way of making that stick. SUVs should be stripped of their engines and hooked up to horses, becoming the modern stagecoach. Birth control should be available to everyone, everywhere. People who use their phones in movies should be ticketed and made to take a class. The drug war should be refocused onto drugs that actually kill people. Blue Laws should be abolished nationwide, and there’s no reason why wine shouldn’t be sold in grocery stores. Post offices and banks should have to keep normal business hours, because what makes them so special, anyway? People who are assholes should be taxed for it (I admit, I’m starting to get a bit fanciful at this point, but we all know at least one person who is an asshole of such a degree that no one would object to them having to subsidize a few poor kids’ lunches or language training for someone looking to improve the nation’s image around the world). Spaying and neutering for pets should be free for all. Sex work should be completely legalized and taxed appropriately.

That’s vaguely where I stand on things. And nobody represents all of those things, except me. So I have to figure out what works for me with what’s around.

Trapezery, 11/07.

This was the first real cover story I ever got published that I still retain the rights to, so here it is. It's from last Thanksgiving, right when I'm Not There was popping up in theatres. This was originally done for Dish Magazine.

REFASHIONING THE FASHIONED: The Who of Bob Dylan

“And refashioning the fashioned, lest it stiffen into iron, is work of endless vital activity.” –Goethe

Memories are details, smells, flashes of color and instances of time, affixed to a wall. In isolation, these fragments can be lovely, or horrifying, echoes of joy or sadness. But in the accumulation of memory, in the course of living one’s life, with enough time having passed, this wall fills with those details. And when you step back and find that each of those isolated pieces of a life, taken together, tell a richer story than imagined, that’s one of the transcendent mysteries of the human experience. It’s the engine behind Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. It’s the metonymic expression of Seurat and the school of pointillism. And it’s why no other artist’s lyrics are like of those of Bob Dylan, and that remains so coming up on fifty years.

There is increased media attention on Bob Dylan at this point, in the fall of 2007, and it is thanks to a sprawling, strange film epic called I’m Not There. Directed and co-written by Todd Haynes (Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven), the film does not so much tell the story of Bob Dylan, but tells several stories of “Bob Dylan,” presenting us with six different selves, each of which embody a different phase or facet of Dylan’s storied career as writer, musician, actor, and persona. It’s as experimental as the genre of biopic gets, and it’s a remarkable achievement. Because of it, there is more ink spilled than usual about Dylan, but the truth of the matter is that he is always around, part of national and global discourse. His is a singular mind, and even today’s media affords him some deal of respect.

“That quote that comes toward the end of the film: “It’s like yesterday, today, and tomorrow all in the same room; there’s no telling what can happen.” That came out of this period where he (Dylan) was studying with a painter in the mid-70s- this was before he did Planet Waves and Blood on the Tracks. The painter, who didn’t know Dylan or, if he did, who didn’t care, treated all of his pupils with a harsh equality, and Dylan responded to that. The theory that the teacher was putting out there was that on a canvas, all of these separate realities can coexist, not only narratively and representationally, but standing back from the painting, one might find a different meaning to the piece than when examining it in pieces, and it inspired Dylan to take more liberty with temporal representation and meaning in his lyrics, and also to put together different stories in his songs.” –Todd Haynes, Director of I’m Not There, in a discussion at the 2007 New York Film Festival.

Dylan encompasses countless aspects of the American life. He has been Born-Again Christian and practicing Jew, he has been hermit, and Angry Young Man, and philosopher King, and Ozymandias. But unlike the latter, his dominion is written in words, and we have extant confirmation of these things, through record and print and film. We even have moments and concepts of the Dylan since gone by the wayside of contemporary media culture: whether through suppression (the post-Don’t Look Back film Eat The Document) or mysterious disappearances (Dylan’s magnificent, Godardian four-plus hour opus Renaldo and Clara), or even works, like The Basement Tapes, that have gradually become available but are separate from that which is Official, we can access parts of the story that weren’t always part of the official record. And again, this is why Dylan fascinates.

Haynes’ film is a remarkable achievement- any one human being is too complex to be adequately expressed by what one character can encompass, so the multiple character approach feels right, in theory, for any complex portrait. That Dylan’s lives and ideas can weave all the disparate elements into something cohesive and evocative just makes the film feel even more satisfying. Everyone’s got an opinion of Bob Dylan- this film just uses that approach to making something immediate and visceral.

“What’s fascinating about Dylan is the way he skirted who he “really was” for things that he really wanted to be, and the wannabe kept changing faces, so he wanted to be Woody Guthrie, and he wanted to be not Jewish, and he wanted to be Arthur Rimbaud, and he wanted to be Billy the Kid, so I let him be all of those things. But a lot of the film, and the jokes of the film, are about trading one authenticity or fakery for another.” –Todd Haynes

“People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around.” -Bob Dylan, 1992

He resists such accolades as ‘voice of a generation,’ precisely because those kinds of epithets are limiting, and there is a spatial and temporal freedom to his songs that spill over such arbitrarily-drawn edges. Whose generation are we speaking of in such statements? To try and nail down a timespace of influence for Dylan’s work is to deny that it is an ongoing phenomenon. Tom Robbins was heading along the same lines when he said that “every day is judgment day.”

“I don't call myself a poet, because I don't like the word. I'm a trapeze artist.” -Bob Dylan

There’s a prankish sense of humor at work here; the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack to the film of his own lives doesn’t feature his own recordings, but rather two discs’ worth of other artists taking their turn at Dylan’s work. But it serves as a testament to Dylan’s relevance and authorial voice that this in no way diminishes the value of the collection- if the film can only explore six different facets of this Bob Dylan, then its album spreads its nets further, allowing thirty-three different voices to add their tones to the picture. The sources may be secondary, but they nevertheless allow us new facets to explore.

“The theory of freedom is very much tied into the idea of identity that the film posits Dylan’s life as an argument for- I think his life, and his work, and the pressures that he lived under, kept forcing that identity into question, and I think the ultimate freedom is to be able to reinvent yourself.”
–Todd Haynes

The philosophy of reinvention has served artists well – just ask David Bowie and Madonna, who have mastered the art of making personal evolution into a facet of marketing. This is not meant to diminish either of their achievements, far from it; but they have made that reinvention into something that is shared with the public on a global scale, and Dylan, while no less adept a chameleon and shifter of shapes, has kept his hand close to his chest. It’s in the music that we find where he’s been and where he’s going, and there is something personal and democratizing about that fact.

“A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.” -Bob Dylan

“The unique weirdness of Dylan at that time has gotten to be so normal, so canonized, we know those images so well- but he was bizarre. When he would play piano in concert, and you see this in Scorsese’s film, where his hand flies up between every line, and he would jump around the stage like a speed-y marionette, and the way he spoke, his gestures, everything about him from that time, is not evident in Don’t Look Back from a year earlier and would never return again after his motorcycle crash at the end of ’66. It was such a complete immersion in this moment… And that’s something you always want to try as a director, you want to re-excite the shock of Chopin in his moment, the craziness of famous people in their famous moments.” –Todd Haynes

So with I’m Not There unspooling in theatres throughout the country this Thanksgiving weekend, with articles written and exhibits opened in galleries and music played and songs sung in honor of the man, the artist, the enigma, it seems a little easier to catch a breath of relief. As besieged as the American soul has been over the past decade, it seems just a little bit more manageable knowing that we still have Dylan around, vital and vibrant and making music, holding out hope while cutting to the bone.

“I still see the people who were with me from the beginning once in a while, and they know what I'm doing.” Bob Dylan, 1965.