Cyrano’s Journal /•\ ||| Placebo ART

When my son wrote me the news about Carlin’s death, he told me his friend had added, “Carlin shouldnt have been allowed to die”. Indeed. I’ve been watching some of the old clips of Carlin, the well known pieces and the less well known. He follows directly in the line from Lenny to Pryor, and by that I mean he is not merely funny, but also conveys that humor through great and obvious intelligence. And he simply could not help but be political. Here is one of the essential Carlin’s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ4SSvVbhLw&feature=related

All three of these *comedians* managed to think on their feet, they were reasoning it out. When Carlin talks about the rich, about the ruling class, he is connecting them to the minimum wage slaves out there. His routine on abortion mentions Cardinal O Connor, and he adds a comment about how they (the preists and cardinals) have no idea about raising children while working some crap minimum wage job. Carlin understood the plight of the poor. This is maybe his greatest virtue, actually. He may have often missed the mark, but he never forgot that people out there suffer. The rich dont suffer, the privledged class dont suffer, but the poor do. He would mention the genocide of Native Americans, or slavery, or dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Often these were tangential asides, simply Carlin providing a context for us. But it was also part of his endless disecting of language. His instincts were good, not perfect, but neither were Lenny’s or Pryors. These men defined American comedy and influenced how we, Americans, saw and see ourselves. Carlin was a clear reminder that a Seinfeld and a Sandler are just corporate pawns, assholes who’ve never imagined a world where they might want for the money to buy food. Carlin never forgot it. He was a political commentator, a sober observer of the hypocricies of white America. I loved when he called Farrakhan *openly black* and added, Colin Powell, well, he isnt, he is *openly white*. It was in a routine devoted to language, to the use of the term *openly* (as in openly gay). He cared about injustice and inequality, and about hypocricy. He constantly, until the end, kept sniffing out the contradictions.

Carlin will be missed, it was somehow comforting knowing he was out there.

John Steppling

I saw The Happening last night. A very bad film, but that was to be expected …. no, the interesting thing here is why so many films with the same plot, more or less, are coming out over a two or three year period. Now apocalyptic sci fi has been a staple of Hollywood for a while, but what seems to be going on of late has to do with a shift in the collective fears in the zeitgeist. If one looks at the following: Dawn of the Dead, I am Legend, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Resident Evil, Cloverfield, Children of Men, War of the Worlds, Day After Tomorrow, and The Invasion — what one sees is something surfacing that was far less clear in earlier incarnations of this genre. That is a kind of frisson about infrastructure failure. It feels like a desire for the technological collapse, rather than a direct of anxiety about it.

Of course there is also the clear expression of powerlessness. That seems a very acute feeling in all these films. Now, these are mostly studio product, and so they are mass produced corporate *entertainment* — and hence perhaps even more of a barometer for whats going on the psyche of western man. The fear comes from outside (unlike, say, German Expressionism, where the threat was inside man himself) and is usually either an alien (war like and aggressive) or a bacterial agent, or some other volitionless and unknowable sub sensory villain. In an age of marketed fear it makes perfect sense for everything to become a threat. In the Shyamalan film the threat is actually *nature* — which is treated in the most reductive Sierra Club fashion. So, even the trees are out to get us. Call Homeland Security.

The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Don Siegal film from the early fifties, was a HUAC allegory, and the Phil Kauffman remake in the seventies sort of stuck to the anti conformist politics of the original. Now I would argue that the latest crop of doomsday films actually are *less* political, even has they wear their **political** themes on their sleeve. It is the Ben & Jerry’s world of political cartoons, a liberal world view where if *we* only take care of the planet, things will be ok. And in every single film, bar none, the military is seen brave and heroic. So it again normalizes militaristic solutions to all problems; whether alien or microbic. This is American essentialism at work, the idea that Americans are inherently heroic and (!!) violent. The violence is, in the case of this genre, a violence of regeneration (to borrow from Richard Slotkin). There is actually an almost colonial legacy at work here — where submission to authority is a given, and where knee jerk refrences to *terrorists* are exhibited in almost every film. In The Happening, a film with almost no plot mind you, the initial reaction of the *government* (expressed via CNN) is that the attack must be from *terrorists*. It turns out to be Gaia ( maybe Lovelock did the polish on this script), but never mind, because the trees induce the kind of violence that alien microbes or viruses do in several other films. Alongside this is the continuing Zombie trope. This makes some sense if we look at the powerlessness aspect again. The infrastructure is top heavy, alienating, and the commodity culture is creating robotic or zombie like people who will self consume.

Im just skimming the surface here, but I wanted to introduce this topic. The desire for meltdown. There is even a sort of collective Munchausen Syndrome aspect to this stuff. All very curious.

A final note on the Shyamalan film. It is just terrible, and because its (Im pretty sure) shot on HD one gets the impression they did a lot of takes and sort of flew by the seat of their expensive pants. There is a lot of *up speak* (where non questions sound like questions)…..and Wahlberg really engages in this a lot. Maybe he thought it made him sound like a science professor. Its a shallow and silly film, and really is a sort of flip side to the *dark* version of Doomsday (Terminator, Dawn of the Dead, etc). I also am reminded, again, of Dr. Strangelove — now, THERE was politics. There was a film that defied notions of genre.

John Steppling

BY JOHN STEPPLING 

Leno with one of his many vintage bikes. Playthings of the very rich, and buffers to reality as lived by the common man.

THE TOPIC OF PATRIOTISM has come up a lot recently, and culminated (for me, anyway) in a recent piece written by Jay Leno — yes, that Jay Leno, asshole apologist for Empire and happy Harley-riding millionaire.

I give it to you in full:

“As most of you know I am not a President Bush fan, nor have I ever been, but this is not about Bush, it is about us, as Americans, and it seems to hit the mark.

‘The other day I was reading Newsweek magazine and came across some Poll data I found rather hard to believe. It must be true given the source,right?

The Newsweek poll alleges that 67 percent of Americans are unhappy with the direction the country is headed and 69 percent of the country is unhappy with the performance of the President.

In essence 2/3 of the citizenry just ain’t happy and want a change. So being the knuckle dragger I am, I started thinking, ‘What are we so unhappy about?”

Read more

I quite agree with you about the issue of entertainment versus art. The two are quite different and conservative, authoritarian elements in American culture are always attempting to blur the lines in order to eliminate art altogether. The intention that animates art is to wake us up; the intention that animates entertainment is to put us to sleep, to zombify us. Speilberg is the most successful at this project and you are quite correct that the obliviousness of supposedly left-wing critics to this fact is the most distressing part of the whole hairball. Left wing critics are still trapped in a neo-Warholian pop mentality, defined by a spirit of resignation with regard to the distortions and horrors of Capitalism. It’s that snarky, sardonic, Village Voice faux populism that every critic for every free counterculture weekly masters early on. A certain kind of earnestness is anathema…but the insidious sentimentality of Speilberg gets a pat on the head. There’s a maddening acceptance of superficiality, as if style can exist independently of meaning, or as if everything has already been said, a smugness that walks hand in hand with the political correctness of identity politics and meanwhile the takes hold of the reins and steers us toward the ditch.

I haven’t been able to post for a while because, actually, I’m shooting a low budget film of a play by Murray Mednick (Gary’s Walk.) A week into a three week shoot I’ve been pondering the politics of the film set and what they have to say about art and money and the self-censoring aspects of business as usual. I recall an interview with Werner Herzog recently in which he decried his experiences working with a Hollywood crew on Rescue Dawn and how there were certain things he wanted to do that his crew just couldn’t swing with and how that limited what the film could say. I’ve been meaning to gather my thoughts about this and post in greater detail when I’m done, but I find it intriguing. Also intriguing are the ways digital media and the internet are overturning the standard model of production and there may be a little daylight there for those willing to take some risks. For now I want to just toss this up there…

Guy Zimmerman

I have only a few varied topics to mention this time. Its been a busy work schedule, and gardening schedule. You’ll all be happy to know (I trust…) that things are growing; everything is up now, including squash and pole beans, and close to twenty tomatoes have been transplanted to the garden. It does take the edge off the madness around one.

Now, first, I watched Kirby Dick’s excellent little documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated last night. I know Kirby a little, and I know his wife Rita as well. What struck me about this investigation into the MPAA’s rating system (you know, NC17, PG, etc) was that what it really revealed was the corporate hegemony at work in Hollywood films. There is a side bar few moments about the Pentagon’s approval of scripts if those scripts are about the US military — meaning, if you want to use our planes and tanks, you have to paint a very positive picture of US aggression, and you must glorify war in all its aspects. The puritanical and absurd system of ratings almost seemed an afterthought. Pubic hair means NC17, and knife wounds can pass as PG. But I mean Lenny Bruce was saying this shit fifty years ago, so its nothing new. The film did point to the amazing consolidation of media, and the endless creation of a reality for the increasingly narcotized populace to accept. Now, this was also a week where I saw the new Indiana Jones abortion. What I wanted to point to regards this trash was that I read a review over at Alter Net (here:http://www.alternet.org/movies/86448/)……which depressed me far more than the film. The assumptions of this review speak directly to the tailoring of taste in our culture over, say, the last 50 some years. By which I mean the faux populism at work, and the foothold that the idea of entertainment managed to achieve. When Jaws is refrenced as a masterpiece, and the writer seems oblivious of directors such as Ozu or Antonioni or Pasolini, then its time to sit back and really think about how far down the road the dominance of pop culture has travelled. Its a stupid review, but it shows clearly the direction of the mediated and totally conditioned audience of 2007.

The current Speilberg is, indeed, a shit picture, but its crappiness is more formulaic and bland than one might think possible. Ford is older and creaky, and he still steals artifacts from indiginious peoples (the better to sell them to the British Museum I guess) and as a final assurance that nothing of real scholarship should intrude and mess with the *broad appeal* of this Speilberg product, the artifacts this time are from outer space (think Erik Van Daniken). God forbid any real analysis of ancient culture make it to the final cut.

I was reminded of Bresson this week because his second wife and former assistant paid a visit to the film school. Mylene Van Der Mersch came and spoke and A Man Escapes was screened. If possible, Bresson seems better and better as time passes. I think people might want to dig up the late trio of color films, Lancelot du Lac, The Devil Probably, and especially L’Argent. This was the ever darker Bresson, where redemption never quite arrived, or rather had been transformed into something like a dark grace. Bresson is most certainly the antidote to Speilberg. I see, in another way, how the dominant corporate machine shapes thought in the coverage of Scotty McClellens book on his time as kiss ass gopher for Bush and Dick Cheney. What is interesting is that the coporate media commentary refers to Scotty as being in bed with *far left* bloggers (shreik, gasp). This kind of distortion serves to move the discourse even further right. That nobody with half a brain had any trust at all in the Buch administration’s drumb beats for war is beside the point. Scotty gets a free ride because he now *reveals* the “slightly” duplicitious nature of Bush and Rove’s PR onslaught — which reached max with Colin Powell at the UN. I remember thinking, damn, does anyone buy this bullshit? Powell started out his house nigger tenure as lead cover-up guy for My Lai. He was still at it prior to the Iraq invasion. So, we see in the Dick docu the inner workings of corporate control over Hollywood — and the default puritanism of American culture, and then the hit film of the summer is a neo-colonial sound stage CGI-fest that culminates in Aliens created ancient civilization — because, you know, those wogs certainly couldn’t have fucking done it on their own. And finally we have Scotty and the hysterical O Reilly reactions — all as part of the trivializing of american culture and politics.

Better to tend your carrots and winter squash and buy a couple Bresson DVDs. Genuine culture serves to purify us, somehow….and nobody did that more beautifully than Bresson. My film gods might include Bresson, Fassbinder, Ozu, Pasolini, Dreyer and Welles. Maybe the Ford of The Searchers, too. A near god catagory might include Wilder, Val Lewton, Nick Ray, Lang, Melville, Godard, Antonioni, Sirk, and Bergman. After that comes Aldrich, Hellman, Siodmak, Huston and Kubrick….Kurosawa and Herzog and Polanski….and probably Rosen and Kazan and Hitchcock and Losey. This is just off the top of my head and I see only one name still active, and thats Herzog.

Film is a highly compromised medium, as we’ve discussed, but it managed and manages, at its best to approach the cultural heights of Beckett, Shakespeare and Pinter. In a sense it does what all great art does….from Dante to Milton to Bach. Its awakens, (Guy’s excellent word for it) and it serves as a kind of conscience and as a political and historical signpost. We live in dark times when all we get is Indiana Jones and Scotty McClellen this summer. But hey, the summer is young…..who knows how much worse it might get.

John Steppling
and this, on Venezuela
http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/print/3473

I think these are excellent points, Guy. Let me first address the liberal leaning side of this film, as I’ve had a few debates with people about the politics of this film. I think its crucial to see that it matters not in the least that an uber capitalist (Bridges) is the villain (top text)…because what the film is more importantly doing is to normalize war and occupation of poor (muslim) countries. Even if we are to believe that Bridges and the US military sponsered these cave dwelling *terrorists* this is a far less significant foreground played out against the background of acceptable and ideologically defended wars of the US empire. It is less significant *who* created these cave dwellers, than it is that they are there, dwelling in caves, muttering in strange tongues, and expressing new sadistic wishes for killing and torture. Wearing the signifiers of evil (of Islam): turbans, beards, etc.

I was thinking how little Abu Graib really took hold of the popular imagination in the US. That iconic photo of the hooded man with electrodes tied to him was the best expression of the Bush era that I can think of, and yet it hasn’t entered into the mainstream. Part of the reason is that films like Iron Man suck up to the Pentagon in order to get use all that high tech hardware and cool authentic uniforms, etc. So the American soldier never resembles the meth driven sociopaths that took those nifty pics of naked men attacked by dogs. They are *always* good and clean and patriotic. So, in these films, the effect, no matter what the silly plot points might be, is to establish the natural law of war and American Imperialist domination, and simultaneously to demonize poor people with dark skins (especially if they wear veils or turbans). So the short memory of most westerners (again, mainly Americans) means that the disapearence of the Abu Graib material from public view means its disapearance from people’s brains. Films like Rendition and Redford’s last, Lambs to Lions, or The Kingdom, no matter how liberal they may try to get, end up deeply reactionary and racist, and more significantly, deeply pro war. A film like Jarhead manages to humanize killing, and to give a human face (sic) to the death machine that is the US military, while carefully keeping the enemy (Muslims) faceless. Read more

I agree that Marx’ materialist rigor, if married to a more sophisticated psychology (buddhist, I suspect), could yield a more effective revolution and want to say more about this. But first, I did manage to see Iron Man finally and, at the risk of beating a dead horse, wanted to post some more thoughts.

The film is seductive. I’d like to be an F-16…I’d like to kick ass against an Abrams tank… Robert Downey Jr. has just enough attitude to work for me as a surrogate-hero. Iron Man was fun to watch, in other words. Sure, lots of racial stereo-typing going on with the evil Muslim-types shouting guttural threats…but then the real embodiment of evil turns out to be Jeff Bridges, uber-Capitalist. All in all the film is a standard-issue, left-leaning, post-Spielberg/Lucas pop-culture myth. Director Jon Favreau has both feet firmly planted in the over-cultivated soil of Joseph Campbell’s seminal The Hero of a Thousand Faces. Every aspiring screenwriter…every young man or woman with ass squeezed into the hard seats of American film schools…every critic tapping out a review for a newspaper or blog has been weaned on Campbell’s neo-Jungian view. Stories, this view suggests, are successful to the degree that they can tap into the mythic archetypes that govern our perceptions of the world. The problem is we have come to crave these collective dreams the way a crack addict craves his rock…and this has lead to a chronic misreading of what myth is all about.

One of the most Campbell-ian motifs in Iron Man is Tony Stark’s artificial heart. Wounded by terrorists, his first task is to make a new heart for himself. This new heart is a luminous disk that rests in a tube Stark has a fellow prisoner insert in his chest. Favreau understands the value of this device. He takes every opportunity to show Gweneth Paltrow’s character (Pepper Potts) reaching into Downey’s chest cavity to make painful adjustments. Every hero takes a wound. The wound is the other side of his (or her) awareness. Every hero must walk into the dark and confront his evil twin – we’ve seen all this before. In fact, the narrative tropes at work in Iron Man define the era that began with Star Wars and Ronald Reagan as fully as does cheap, abundant oil and the steroids that dominate American sports. But this era and it’s skewed values is old now and it feels old.

The problem with Joseph Campbell and his dumbed-down Jung is that it accepts entirely a childish view of human agency. Fairy tales, myths in general, ride on a tone that is actually more dreamlike than childish. The tone of myths and fairy tales is linked to terror, and the terror has to do with the fact that the landscape is unstable and capable always of dangerous transformations. Our modern mythmakers forget all about this, imposing on their narratives a Manichean good vs. evil narrative that no-one from ancient times would ever recognize. This is why blockbuster films, even when they are as well-executed as Iron Man, feel so formulaic and empty today. And the shallowness of Joseph Campbell’s ideas about human psychology explains why these films end up buttressing a rightwing agenda, despite their leftwing intentions.

Iron Man, like all the comic book superheroes before him, is an avatar of the human ego in its wish for permanence and invulnerability. The dangers the narrative cooks up for him are intended only to underscore that permanence and invulnerability. These were characters first concocted for pre-adolescent boys confused by a world of staggering complexity with disturbing shadows in the far distance that connected to the realities of death and decay.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg breathed new life into this approach to character and narrative, sounding the death knell of the great era of American auteurs. They did this in the mid-1970s, when Ronald Reagan and his co-horts were ushering in a world of comic book American imperialism and hegemony that has culminated in the criminal junta of Bush-Cheney. The link between the rise of Reagan and the rise of Lucas/Speilberg has yet to be adequately understood. The fact that both filmmakers contribute to the campaigns of Democrats has nothing to do with it. It is Karl Rove and his minions in the Great Right Wing Conspiracy who have perfected the art of applying Campbell’s comic book tropes to the political arena. Iron Man, by his nature, works to support the agenda of the Right and it doesn’t matter at all what Robert Downey Jr., Jeff Bridges or Jon Favreau have to say about it.

Guy Zimmerman

There is a lot of focus now on food and small organic farms. The estimable Keith Harmon Snow is starting up The Wildcat Sanctuary for Peace and Re-education. I hope in later postings to provide more info. I know Stan Goff has written about this, and quite a few others. Wendell Berry has been very relevent for a long time. The power and control of mass culture however is in the hands of the corporate class — and media silences voices like Snow if they can. That information must be searched for, and people have little time or energy for such searching, and little inclination in many cases.

Here is an essential piece from The Monthly Review:
http://www.monthlyreview.org/080501magdoff.php

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I feel a kind of vertigo at times, and a recent documentary (sic) on the Milosevic trial is now out that contributes to this feeling. There are so many outright lies in the press release that one starts to get the shakes. I wont go into details because I’ve done that several times in the past. Suffice it to say a clear record of the trial can be found in John Laughland’s Travesty as well a good over view in Michael Mandell’s Getting Away with Murder. This leads me to a topic we go round about a lot….and I think I dont quite know what you mean when you suggest the left needs traction (per your last post). If this means the Democrats, then ok, but I dont consider that the left. The Cuban Revolution has done just fine, despite fifty years of embargo and attack from the US. This is crucial to bear in the mind regards the Bolshevik Revolution and even Mao. The counter revolution was at work immediatly. Same in Nicaragua, obviously. I think Chavez is doing just fine, and so is Morales. Remember in these last two cases that the US is already deeply invested in destabilizing these countries. The break up of Yugoslavia is yet another example. The question of state theory is complex and I cant provide much in depth analysis here on a blog, but I think its hard to evaluate the *success* or *failure* of socialist projects outside of historical context. Has the US been a success? Clearly not. In fact the US is the largest failed state in the history of the world. The problem then is multi faceted. I certainly have my rather profound frustrations with the left today. The trotskyist puritans, the arm chair University class research addicted proles who people the internet. They lack even a dim grasp of real politik, and they seem more concerned with winning debate points on obscure arguments from the comminterm circa 1921 than looking for solutions or even genuine critique. Resistance must be supported, and its not a perfect world. But I would still insist we are confusing catagories here. Read more

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A few names come to mind regarding your last post. Wendell Berry, obviously. All his books are clear on the problems you describe and alarming. Only last month he published an article in Harpers called “Faustian Economics” that underscores your points:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/05/0082022

Berry has been walking the walk since the 1960s, not only as a writer, but as a yeoman farmer and advocate of local economies and resistance to the corporate domination of “agribusiness” as well. The late Ian McHarg, who ran the Landscape Architecture department at UPenn, is relevant also. His book Design with Nature showed what would be possible if developers and planners bothered to learn a few basics about the physical systems in which they build. McHarg had a big influence on the Green movements but the book is still a great read. I think also about Christopher Alexander, the architect, who explored what could be done designing and building housing and other structures with the people and communities who actually used them. A New Theory of Urban Design is a good book to start with.

For environmentalists these are probably basic texts, but what’s striking is how much accurate information and cogent analysis has been out there for years, and yet the corporate behemoth continues to plow forward. Hell, you could go back a century and a half to Marx himself for a spot-on description of the malaise we’re living through.

I don’t know how you avoid a sense of crippling powerlessness and the impotent rage if you don’t arrive at some satisfying explanation for how a system so flawed in such obvious, glaring ways could possibly remain so dominant, so resistant to change for so long. The classic explanation on the left is that crafty, resourceful and fully malevolent individuals in the ownership class are able to deploy their resources in order to thwart any effort at meaningful reform. On one level this is accurate and true…as far as it goes. But this explanation has its feet firmly planted in the 19th century and a kind of pre-Freudian, pre-modernist definition of the individual as an atomized whole, fully re-ified. This explanation is emotionally satisfying in some ways - motivating even - but it’s always confusing to encounter members of this demonized group - the ownership class - and find your indictment melting away while confronted with the ontological facts. It’s also sobering to look with clarity at the ways your own day-to-day existence is compromised, co-opted or otherwise tainted, by the system you are attempting to supplant. In the early years of the 20th century revolutionaries just buckled down and became remorseless about these issues. It was a Rousseau-ian vision - the evil and the ignorance of man is a product of a deforming system and its deformed mode of being. Revise the system and evil be gone. By 1950 this was increasingly difficult to reconcile with what had taken place historically, and the left has been searching for real traction ever since. The reason I am continually bringing this up is that I WANT the left to have traction, and I still believe the problems have to do with how large scale economic and political realities relate to and reflect the psychological processes that give rise to them. Real change will only come with a clearer understanding of how greed, destructive rage and our astonishing ability to ignore reality affect our actions on every level.

Guy Zimmerman