Sleeping Jeremy

the new novel, part II

2008-08-15T15:19:02Z

So I've been kicking around a variety of books for that "New Novel" course I'll be teaching this fall, and some things are finally beginning to fall into place.
I'm definitely going with Patrik Ourednik's Europeana (2005) as my "experimental-form" novel; it not only pushes the boundaries of what could be considered a novel (in a way that will be fruitful for discussion), but it also gives a big recap of global 20th-century events and thus sets up some useful themes for us to work with, here in the early days of the 21st.
I'd like to follow this up with either Lynda Barry's Cruddy (2000) or Alicia Erian's Towelhead (2006), as sort of a way to look at how those 20th-century forces impact powerless people, specifically using the figure of the adolescent girl to get at this. Of the two, I marginally prefer Cruddy, in part because its status as an "illustrated novel" fulfills my interest in having a "hybrid" book on the list: it opens up a juncture where we can talk about the critical rise of the graphic novel over the last ten years or so. Plus Towelhead has a lot more sexuality in it, and there's only a certain amount of that kind of stuff that I feel comfortable dragging into the classroom.
I also wanted a classically-structured novel, but one which deals thematically with some of the "big issues" that the class increasingly looks to be built around: I'm currently reading Ann Patchett's Bel Canto (2001), which tells a story about terrorists raiding a high-class dinner party in South America as a possible candidate there. Patchett sees human interaction as being capable of generating real beauty, and the book is clearly focused on locating these moments even in the midst of violent crisis. Used too liberally, this could descend into Pollyanna-ism, and the book is definitely running that risk, but it might be a nice antidote to follow the bleakness of Cruddy. [Still a little tempted to wedge in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2005) instead, although this would break my 50/50 gender breakdown.]
[I'd also consider dropping the "traditional" novel entirely in favor of another hybrid, if I could find another good one by a female writer... the obvious choice here is Carole Maso's utterly fascinating novel The Art Lover, which I'd love to re-read, but it seems a stretch to call something originally published in 1990 a "new" novel.]
And finally, I wanted something "outside" the realm of the literary novel, preferably a graphic novel or piece of genre work: I'm leaning here towards Colson Whitehead's great science-fiction-ish novel about elevator repair, The Intuitionist (2000), although I'm also still considering including a graphic novel in this slot, specifically Paul Pope's science-fiction-ish 100%. [One advantage of 100% is that it's a quicker read, and I'm concerned about having enough time to teach the writing elements of the course if I'm also dealing with four long-ish novels.]
Almost decision-making time! Anyone who wants to try to sway me, speak up!

film club XXXVIII: peeping tom

2008-08-14T18:18:00Z

One of the things that's going on in Diary of the Dead that I didn't write about last week is the film includes a critique of specatation: the human desire to look at things. Specifically, the film wonders aloud about the part of human psychology that wants to look at horrible things—violent acts, accidents, etc.—and it repeatedly holds up the film's documentary-filmmaker character as a character who possesses a hypertrophic form of this particular desire. (It's not too hard to speculate that Romero intends this criticism to extend to horror filmmakers as well, and thus functions as a form of self-critique.) For Romero, spectation serves at best as a form of passivity and at worst as a kind of morbid perversion. We don't look because we want to help, we look because it gratifies some vaguely unwholesome impulse in us.
As a critique, Romero's definitely holds water, although there are more extreme critiques of spectation out there, including the one found in this week's pick, Peeping Tom (1960).
Peeping Tom announces its interest in "looking" pretty baldly in its opening shot:

...and, like Diary, it draws a bridge between "looking" and "filmmaking": our main character is not only an aspiring filmmaker with a handheld camera:

...but he also works as part of a film-production crew (making a suspense thriller entitled The Walls Are Closing In):

...and, just to emphasize the focus on "looking" even more strongly, the film has him also working as a smut photographer:

In terms of its take on pornography, Peeping Tom would seem to echo Diary's concerns about spectation (or LOL's for that matter): in all three of these films, the consumption of visual matter is seen as a somewhat gross indulgence of the suspect desire to look. Here's how Peeping Tom portrays the average consumer of pornography:

However, Peeping Tom is willing to go a bit further, explicitly equating the viewing of bodies with the suffering of those bodies. It does this both subtly... (note the repetition of the word "PAIN" here outside the newsstand among the bodies of pin-ups):

...and also, as we will see, more explicitly. For, in the world of Peeping Tom, it's not merely that suffering is connected in some vague way in the production of pornography, but rather that the act of viewing in and of itself is a form of violence, making the camera a sort of weapon-technology. Here's the view through Mark's camera:

Those hairlines aren't just there for show, either: the main premise of the film, for those of you who don't know it, is that Mark is not merely a voyeur, but also a psychopath. Periodically he converts one leg of the camera's tripod into a blade, which he then uses to murder the women he's filming, while simultaneously filming the murder. We've learned this before the opening credits are finished:

Mark's obviously an extreme case, but the film doesn't hesitate to draw parallels between his behavior and the behavior of every other filmmaker in the film. The director of the film-within-a-film is also governed by sadistic impulses, as we see when he presses his lead actress to do take after take, until she collapses from exhaustion:

[To cement the parallel as explicitly as possible, Mark later murders the actress' stand-in, on set: a sequence during which he occasionally sits in the director's chair.]

There's a third sadistic filmmaker in the film, too, namely, Mark's father, a psychologist studying the physiology of fear in children. As the film unfolds, we learn that the young Mark was subjected to fear experiments, being used essentially as a human guinea pig, and having the results documented, on film, by Dad himself:

So. An interesting result of the filmmaker's decision to show Mark as having himself been the subject of spectation and the victim of sadistic impulses is that the film ends up generating a considerable amount of empathy for him (putting this film perhaps in the category of earlier Film Club picks like Spike Lee's 25th Hour (Film Club VII). In point of fact, Mark ends up being one of the most sympathetic serial killers in film history (Mark's character owes more than a small debt to Peter Lorre's portrayal of an also not-entirely-unsympathetic killer in Fritz Lang's fantastic M (1931)).
This empathy is pretty essential for the narrative of the film to hang together, because it's set up not so much as a horror-thriller (the way it seems to commonly be understood) but rather as a kind of doomed romance between Mark and his downstairs neighbor, Helen.

Helen is kind, and reaches out to Mark in a way that he's clearly not accustomed to: she invites him to her 21st birthday party, and even after he declines in the most squirrely, nervous way possible, she brings him a piece of her birthday cake:

Like other romances, then, Peeping Tom is structured narratively in a way that sets up a couple that looks like they should be together, and has them attempt to surmount obstacles that are in their way. It's just that, in this case, the obstacle is, well, irreperable psychosis. Much of the film is spent showing Mark putting energy into attempting to resist his psychotic impulses, an endeavor that also involves actively attempting to re-think his relationship to women, in order to think of Helen as something other than prey.

It's an odd choice, and in order for it to be successful we have to erase our memory of the humanity of Marc's vicims, and our desire to have him be brought to justice. However, this aspect does add a lot of extra pathos to a story that's already shocking, and clever, and theoretically interesting to boot.
Next week we'll compare it against that other 1960 proto-slasher-film, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Stay tuned!

the new novel

2008-08-13T10:55:30Z

So those of you who read my Facebook news-feed know that I've accepted an offer to teach two writing courses at Boston University this fall, loosely themed around the topic of "The New Novel."
This is a topic I can have some fun with, obviously, and I quickly decided that a good course on the New Novel should endeavor to include the following things:
A more-or-less classically-structured novel, but which deals with topics that are distinctly "21st-century" in orientation. [William Gibson's Pattern Recognition or Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis or Falling Man are the types of books that fit comfortably in this slot.]
Something that deals with similiar topics, but is more experimental or progressive in terms of its form. [Patrik Ourednik's Europeana might work well here, and I'm tempted to include something like Ben Marcus' Notable American Women or Leslie Scalapino's "trilogy" The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion, but these are probably both slightly too ambitious for college freshmen.]
A hybrid text, something that is "novelistic" in orientation but clearly reacting to the pressures of "visual culture" / multimedia. [Steve Tomasula's VAS: An Opera In Flatland would be a blast to teach, but something like Lynda Barry's "illustrated novel" Cruddy or Zach Plague's brand-new boring boring boring boring boring boring boring could work equally well.]
Something "outside" the realm of the literary novel, preferably a graphic novel. [In a pinch I could use a piece of genre fiction, most likely SF or horror.]

I also am [typically] concerned with balance of representation, so I'd like to see at least one novel by a non-Caucasian writer and at least one novel by a non-North American writer, and I'd like the list to be fifty/fifty in terms of gender distribution.
The problem, sadly, is that I'm trying to limit myself to only four books (ultimately the course is a writing course and not a Lit survey), and trying to fit the four "types" that I want with the gender and ethnicity constraints that I set up is proving something of a diabolical logic puzzle. I'm pretty close to "locking in" on Gibson and Tomasula, white men both (sigh), which means that ideally I'll find a graphic novel and an experimental 21st-century novel, both written by women, at least one of whom is non-Caucasian.
Persepolis is holding a lot of appeal in the graphic-novel category, but its autobiographical status might eliminate it from the running, and as far as I can tell, most crticially-acclaimed graphic novels by women tend to be memoirish. (See also: Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.) Has anyone out there read Jessica Abel's La Perdida?
If I swap out the graphic novel for a genre novel, Octavia Butler is a potentially fruitful person to work with, although her only 21st-century novel is Fledgling, not generally considered her strongest work.
In terms of the experimental novel, I think Miranda Mellis' The Revisionist might hold some appeal, and its SF trappings might tie it well to the Gibson and Tomasula, but I haven't read it (a copy is winging its way to me as we speak).
You readers are good at this kind of thing. Recommendations?
Related: Roundtable on gender imbalance in SF / fantasy publishing

The Street Where I Live

2008-08-10T14:25:25Z

The Street Where I Live
Originally uploaded by jbushnell.

Many of you know that earlier this year I accepted an offer to do some caretaking. I'm watching after a house owned by my cousins, a place that's been in the family since the time of my childhood. It's in rural Massachusetts, a little town called Halifax (pop. 7,500, according to this Wikipedia article), which means that for the first time in nearly twenty years I'm spending the bulk of my living time outside of the boundaries of a major US city. (I'm within walking distance of a commuter rail line, though, which means I'm not terribly far from Boston and its surrounding environs.)
I thought readers of this blog might appreciate getting to see what my living quarters look like, so I've set up a Flickr set to show you around. Take a look! Notification of my change of address will be coming to many of you via e-mail sometime in the next couple of days.

film club XXXVII: diary of the dead

2008-08-09T01:49:45Z

So, this week, Film Club watched George Romero's new zombie picture, Diary of the Dead, as a way of continuing our investigation of representations of the contemporary hyper-mediated landscape.
This film represents a break in continuity for Romero: whereas his previous four Dead films (Night, Dawn, Day and Land) follow one another chronologically, Diary chooses instead to go back to the day when zombie activity first breaks out (what we could call "Z-Day," to borrow a term from Romero homage Shaun of the Dead).
Z-Day is a conceit invented by Romero in 1968 and has not visited by him again since then, and his return to it may represent something of an attempt to rethink the story for a contemporary audience. For starters, Diary represents a sustained attempt to realistically represent how a zombie attack would look through the lens of contemporary televised crisis reportage: we repeatedly see footage that conjures up memories of the LA riots / Columbine / 9-11 / Katrina, etc.:

It's worth noting, however, that this isn't really a new concern for Romero: even in the 1968 Night of the Living Dead, radio and television reportage is central to the way the story unfolds, and even back then Romero pretty much nailed how, in a crisis, people tend to huddle around the protective glow of anything that emits information. Diary recognizes, however, that the palette of these technologies has expanded pretty dramatically over the past forty years:

...and it expends a goodly amount of its run-time trying to consider how people (especially young people) might make use of the Internet to respond in a Z-Day type situation. (One wonders whether he was aware of last year's Internet event in which hundreds of bloggers made posts about the global zombie uprising.)
Ultimately, though, Romero is less interested in blogs and more interested in the Internet's capacity for widespread digital video distribution. Indeed, the film itself is primarily conceived of as a film-within-the-film (a documentary called The Death of Death), and a chunk of the film's narrative propulsion (although less than is ultimately possible) comes from our protagonist's desire to record more footage for the film.

In some ways, this decision to make the protagonist a young filmmaker invites a reading of the film as autobiographical, although Romero traditionally feels a deep pessimism about all human endeavor, and that includes here the impulse of "bloggers, hackers, [and] kids," to grow their own media. An incomplete version of the protagonist's film, once uploaded, gets 72,000 hits in eight minutes, which helps him to argue that the film is "saving lives," but one gets the feeling that Romero himself isn't convinced. "The more voices there are," says the film's narrator, "the more spin there is. The truth gets that much harder to find. In the end, it's all just noise."

These reflections upon media are pretty obviously the film's reason for existence: although the normal emotional touch-points of the zombie film (killing your friend who has become a zombie, etc.) are dutifully included, they are dispensed with in an almost perfunctory fashion. And ultimately, this year's earlier Cloverfield may be a better investigation of the intersection of monster apocalypse plus man-on-the-street video—Cloverfield's dialogue is far more naturalistic, and features less overt hand-wringing about the nature of mediation. Nevertheless, this still feels like something of a return to form for Romero: he still has considerable skill at imagining the way our contemporary infrastructure might slide into collapse, something Land, a film with no small whiff of science fiction about it, got away from a bit.
Next week we're sticking with horror and spectation, which means we're going to have to pay a pilgrimage to Horror and Spectation Ground Zero: 1960's bit of snuff nastiness, Peeping Tom.

film club XXXV + XXXVI: krapp's last tape | LOL

2008-08-04T16:26:11Z

[Some of the pictures behind the cut are marginally NSFW, so click with caution.]
Over the past few weeks Film Club has watched two films that deal with the relationship between human beings and their technologies of communication, recording, and archiving.
First up was Atom Egoyan's memorable adaptation of Krapp's Last Tape, Samuel Beckett's meditation on old age. (It's available on the third disc of the Beckett on Film set.)
In this play, the main character, Krapp, spends his days in a dwelling which (at least in this particular production of the play) is crammed to the gills with journals, notes, and files.

He's an old man, and he appears to be going at least partially mad from extended isolation. There are no other characters in the play (or the film), it's just Krapp and us.

As it turns out, Krapp has been something of an obsessive self-documenter for much of his life, and he has spent many years keeping a sort of audio journal. The central dramatic event of the film is simply Krapp selecting a spool of audiotape out of his archive and listening back through it.

If you've ever kept a journal (or audio journal, or blog), and then revisited it years later, you know that this is not an activity that comes without its fair share of emotional risk. It has the capacity to summon up fond memories, yes, but it also has the capacity to summon up regrets, remorse, feelings of loss, irrational contempt towards one's younger self, etc. In short, it can be the stuff of drama. John Hurt does a fantastic job embodying the complexities and subtleties of Krapp's reactions:

The play's most clever conceit is its doubling of this entire dramatic mechanism: the tape that Krapp selects to listen to is one from his late-thirties, but the tape was made on an evening when Krapp had engaged in the activity of listening to an even earlier tape, one from his mid-twenties. Krapp at thirty-nine listens to himself at twenty-five and thinks "God, listen to that arrogant, self-important, foolish young man. Look at the mistakes he was making, and he didn't even know it." Krapp at sixty-nine listens to himself at thirty-nine and thinks the same thing. One gets the sense that there's never a point in life at which one can speak in a way that one's future, hopefully wiser self will respect.
So, in Beckett's universe, the pleasures of one's life—being grounded in the present—tend to deliquesce, whereas one's regrets and remorse—being grounded in the past—tend to persist. Therefore, there can be no comfort in the archive: attempting to experience a pleasure via its documentation only helps to remind us of its loss. This is the stuff of real terror.
* * *
To get the idea of our follow-up, LOL, you could almost think of it as "Li'l Krapps." Where Krapp is about an old man looking back on recordings of his life and lamenting what an arrogant, self-important, foolish young man he once was, and the mistakes he once made, then LOL is about a group of arrogant, self-important, foolish young men, making recordings of their life and making mistakes, but still young enough not to have had the experience of looking back on this with regret.

The other big difference between LOL (made in 2006) and Krapp (originally written in 1959), of course, is the increased ubiquity of recording, archiving, and communications technology. I'm a little surprised that Facebook people seem to dislike this film quite as much as they do (it's only pulling in a pretty low 2 1/2 stars at Flixter's "Movies" application), for it seems like it's made by and for them. (The weak characterization of the female characters might have something to do with it, I guess.) But still, I'm pleased to see a film that acknowledges the existence of a behavior as contemporary as taking a picture of one's own haircut with a cell phone:

And I'm always pleased when people in movies use actual browsers instead of some phony movie-world browser:

As you might have guessed from that preceding screenshot, one concern that LOL shares with Krapp's Last Tape is the mediation of pleasure, although in LOL this is specifically located around the erotic electronic image, either pornography located on the Internet:

...or the amateur image transmitted between members of a relationship as an expression of erotic connection:

...or even the (ever-growing) areas where these two categories become indistinguishable from one another:

Whether this sort of image-transmission constitutes interpersonal connection is one of the more genuine areas of concern in this film. As for whether the surplus mass of electronic documentation we generate these days will, forty years down the road, constitute something we can paw through to generate the kind of reflections that characterize Krapp's Last Tape remains to be seen.
Despite the fact that I'm now in MA, and my Film Club collaborator Skunkcabbage remains in Chicago, we're going to try to keep the Film Club going. Our next film will stick with this "mediation" theme, although see how it gets interpreted by the world of horror: we'll be moving on to George Romero's latest, Diary of the Dead (2008).

away notification

2008-07-29T01:16:31Z

I'm currently in the throes of executing a cross-country move, from Chicago to the Greater Boston Area, and my days these past... two weeks or so have been pretty consumed with packing, purging, and lugging. Thursday (the 31st) I drive halfway to Boston and Friday (the 1st) I go the rest of the way, and this blog will update again not long afterwards.

moral configurations

2008-07-24T14:12:33Z

Those of you who weren't / aren't gamer geeks may not be aware of a funny little merit of the Dungeons and Dragons character-generation system, which is that one of the attributes you set for yourself is your "alignment," a value that stands in, essentially, for your morality.
I've always liked the way that the alignment system works in Dungeons and Dragons because it's a two-axis system: there's the basic good-to-evil axis that you'd expect, but there's also an axis ranging from "lawful" to "chaotic," which describes your degree of attraction to order. If you were to draw this out as a scatterplot, it would define four major areas, which, in Dungeons and Dragons parlance, are Lawful Good, Chaotic Good, Lawful Evil, and Chaotic Evil.
Last night I saw the new Batman movie (OK, OK, The Dark Knight) and one of the things that I noticed about it is that its major characters align to these four areas. To wit:
Chaotic Good: Batman

Lawful Good: Harvey Dent

Lawful Evil: Two-Face

Chaotic Evil: The Joker
This is not that interesting, in and of itself, to anyone except former gamer geeks like myself, except that it highlights the film's interest in these polarities, in the way that good defines itself against evil, and in the way that order defines itself against chaos. Especially interesting in both Dungeons and Dragons and The Dark Knight is their refusal to conflate good with order and chaos with evil. These pairings can be, and are, often found together (and Heath Ledger's turn as the Joker is nothing if not a memorable embodiment of Chaotic Evil in its most prime manifestation), but they also can be, and are, often decoupled. A recognition of that allows for a more complicated and rich moral universe, and The Dark Knight's exploration of these different configurations is, to my mind, the film's greatest strength.
[A sad closing note: the Wikipedia article on alignment informs me that the new Fourth Edition of the Dungeons and Dragons rules has gone the simpler route, eliminating both Lawful Evil and Chaotic Good. Bloody dualists!]

film club XXXIV: rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead

2008-07-14T18:47:12Z

So last week we watched The Adventures of Mark Twain, a film that makes use of some famous characters from literature to tell its narrative. Our follow-up, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, similarly raids the storehouse of classic literature for characters—this time drawing from the works of Shakespeare, instead of the works of Twain.
There's one important difference between the two films, however. The Adventures of Mark Twain recontextualizes Twain's characters by writing them into an aeronautic adventure, one never penned by Twain. The central plot of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, by contrast, will be familiar to anyone who has read Hamlet.
For those of you who need the Cliff's Notes version, here it is: these two guys are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (played most excellently by Tim Roth and Gary Oldman):

These two are old pals of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, who, at the outset of the story, has been acting pretty eccentric. They enter into the play because they're called in by the King to use their status as Hamlet's trusted friends to get close to him and figure out what his deal is.

This is kind of a sleazy request—imagine being called in by the stepfather of any of your close friends to do the same—but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern agree, and they meet up with Hamlet and basically attempt to perform some amateur psychoanalysis on him. Hamlet's much more deft than they are, however, and he spends most of this conversation engaging them in wordplay, feeding them disinformation, and generally running rings around them.

Eventually, he grows impatient with their duplicity, and he arranges, through his own act of duplicity, to have them both be executed by the King of England.

All of this material appears in Hamlet and it appears in the movie in a way that is more or less faithful to the play. For instance, in any scene where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern speak to Hamlet, the King, or the Queen, all of the dialogue is completely faithful to the dialogue that appears in the original.
What's interesting about this, though, is that these scenes are relatively few and far between. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern aren't very major characters within Hamlet, and so they're off-stage a lot of the time. What director Tom Stoppard endeavors to do with this film is show what these characters are doing when they're off-stage. It's here where Stoppard breaks with the Shakespearean trappings: he has Rosencrantz and Guildenstern speak in a more modern idiom, play word-games, and indulge in anachronistic hijinks:

The end result is something of an absurdist, inverted version of Hamlet, in which the status of minor characters and main characters are reversed. Hamlet is a fabulous choice to do this with, because it is already metafictional and self-reflexive to begin with: even in its original form it contains a play-within-a-play, performed by a troupe of travelling actors, that retells some of Hamlet's backstory. Stoppard—who comes to the cinema via his background as a playwright and theatrical director—amps up this element, partially by loading the film with stage-sets and and audiences:

...and partly by having Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the actors spend their "offstage" time together, with the end result is that we see even more staged versions of the Hamlet plot points:

All of this gamesmanship is a lot of fun, but there's something deeper in it than just play: it also invites reflection upon the nature of identity and existence. There's something about fiction in general that encourages us to muse upon whether we can trust our own ontological status or sense of reality—it has something to do, I think, with the way that fiction presents us with characters who have realistic thoughts, and internal consciousnesses that resemble our own, but who also have a clearly invented status. You don't have to ruminate on these ideas for long before you're reflecting upon mortality and fate, and, if the title didn't clue you in, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is very interested in indulging those reflections:

In my opinion, the film holds up less for its gags (some of which are very fine), but more for the sense of deep melancholy at its core. It's the rare example of a film that can be both absurd and yet also deeply affecting.
Next week we'll be delving even deeper into theatrical existentialism, courtesy of the master, Samuel Beckett: we'll be watching an adaptation of his play Krapp's Last Tape.

my movie life

2008-07-10T16:00:56Z

This post is part of Culture Snob's "Self-Involvement" Blog-A-Thon, running July 9-13th. For this Blog-A-Thon, Jeff's asked film bloggers to blog not so much about movies, but about oneself, as seen through the lens of movies. As an example, he linked to an old piece of his writing, "My Movie Life," sharing some key personal details about, well, his life and the movies. That proved too irresistible a model not to ~~follow~~ steal. So without further ado, here's a cool thirty fragments of my own movie life.
1. The first movie I remember seeing was Star Wars (1977), which I saw with my parents at the local drive-in theatre. I remember items in the car (in particular, a Styrofoam cooler) more than I remember anything about that particular viewing of the movie.
2. I feel fortunate to have had that drive-in theatre as a place to hang out in my adolescence, an experience that nothing else really substitutes for. Movies I can remember seeing there: Jurassic Park (1993), Total Recall (1990), Mom and Dad Save the World (1992). The site of the drive-in is now a Target.
3. I can remember having to leave the theatre early during a viewing of Superman (1978), because I was sniveling and crying. (I think the reason for this was because the non-Superman parts were too slow and boring, but I cannot really recall the incident.)
4. The first cinematic nudity I ever saw was on videotape; a friend showed me Risky Business (1983) and the nearly-forgotten My Tutor (1983).
5. The first cinematic nudity I saw in the theatre was Revenge of the Nerds (1984). (I was with a group of young men who went for a friend's birthday party; we were accompanied by his father.)
6. The only R-rated movie I can recall being turned away from at the box office was David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986); it is still one of my favorite movies.
7. I can remember seeing a videotaped copy of Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) in around sixth grade, and I remember the first murder in that film made an astonishing impact on me. I still can't watch that movie without feeling a mix of anticipation and genuine dread as that scene approaches.
8. In the wake of this, I spent maybe five years watching as many different 80s slasher or monster movies as I could get my hands on, most of them not very good.
9. The films that mark the end of this phase, for me, are Bloodsucking Freaks (1976) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978), both of which I saw in 1990 or 1991, and both of which left me feeling depressed and more than a little unclean. My relationship to horror has been love-hate ever since.
10. Around 1988-1990 I saw videotaped copies of Blue Velvet (1986) and Pink Flamingos (1979), both of which, in their own ways, provided the same visceral shock that Nightmare on Elm Street had provided, but both clearly had agendas that were more complicated than mere shock. Each of these dramatically expanded my sense of what cinema could legitimately try to do.
11. I saw Wild at Heart (1990) three times in the theatre. Its prurient mix of sex, violence, and Americana really was pretty ideal for me at age 17. (As an adult, I've come to think of it as one of Lynch's weaker films.) A few years later I saw Pulp Fiction (1994) in the theatre three times. I believe the most recent film I've done that with was The Incredibles (2004).
12. Eraserhead (1977) was a David Lynch film that was legendary in my suburban neighborhood (this was in the wake of Twin Peaks, when David Lynch was getting cover-story profiles in Time) but copies of it were hard to find—there was only one video store in the area that carried it (Southampton Video). That was the first movie that I went substantially out of my way to see. (It is still one of my favorite movies.)
13. Delicatessen (1991) was the first film that I read reviews of when it was still in theaters, and travelled into Philly from my suburban home to see at an art house theatre (the Ritz, where I would later work for a short stint). The second film I did this for was Naked Lunch (1991). (Both of these are still among my favorite movies.)
14. The first film I ever saw that I wanted to watch again the second I finished it was Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985).
15. Movies I owned, early on: I recorded Yellow Submarine (1968) off of television; I bought a copy of Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982) when the video store was liquidating their Betamax stock; I purchased a copy of Heathers (1989) in 1990 and began to wear a black trench coat almost immediately thereafter. I've probably seen each of these films at least ten times, and I don't think I've seen any of them in the last ten years, although I still own a copy of Yellow Submarine.
16. The first foreign-language film I ever saw was probably Fellini's Amarcord (1973).
17. The first foreign-language film I ever counted as one of my favorite films was Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963).
18. I owe a lot of my film literacy to my years at La Salle University, in Philadelphia, which had a private screening room in the basement of the library that students could use, and a fairly good stock of freely-available films. This was a great resource at a time when I had little money, and I saw an incredible number of important films in that little room.
19. One of the things I watched down there was Fantasia (1940), which also marks the first time I ever took acid.
20. I took a few great film seminars at La Salle, including one on Hitchcock and one on Coppola, Scorsese, and Woody Allen (a course inspired, I believe, by their pairing in the relatively weak New York Stories (1989)).
21. The first film writing I can ever remember doing I did for these seminars: I remember doing a "close reading" on a scene from Taxi Driver (1976) and one on the dream sequence from Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945).
22. Also at LaSalle, some other film geek students and I formed a film club. We were allowed to use one of the screening classrooms as long as we could make the argument that we were using it for educational purposes; to this end, we were required to have a student give an informative lecture about whatever film we'd screened. I can recall personally giving lectures on A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Barton Fink (1991).
23. Also at La Salle, in someone's dorm room, I watched my first pornographic video. The name eludes me but I did not find it especially erotic. (I am pretty sure that on the same day and in the same dorm room, I saw Blade Runner (1982) for the first time.)
24. I am seldom aroused by film (including porn); that may be a side effect of being in my mid-thirties, but I can't remember being especially aroused by any earlier films, either. Perhaps it's the mediating effect of cinema, but movies make sex or nudity seem weirdly abstract or stylized somehow (I think it may do the same thing with violence, only to a net positive effect instead of a net negative effect). In any case, film ranks a distant fourth in terms of its erotic impact on me (behind interpersonal interaction, imagination, and language (either written or spoken)).
25. Along these lines, I mostly don't get crushes on actresses, although there are at least a few who have done a scene here or there that is stored somewhere in my erotic memory. I will confess, however, that in early adolescence I found Wendy Schall's character in The 'Burbs (1989) to be the paragon of female beauty. And there was a period where I probably wanted a girlfriend like Beetlejuice / Heathers-era Winona Ryder. More recently, I wanted a girlfriend like Patricia Arquette in True Romance (1993), and I appreciate every moment of her smokin'-hot presence in Lost Highway (1997).
26. The last movie I can remember feeling aroused by while viewing was Sex and Lucia (2001). If anyone's got a more recent recommendation of something that Worked For You, well, that's what the comments box is for. Bring it on.
27. The last movie that made me squirm in my seat with discomfort was Oldboy (2003), and the one before that was Audition (1999). I found the first Saw (2004) to be laughably tame by comparison. Again I'll ask for recommendations.
28. I went through a period where I didn't watch many movies, roughly 2004-2006.
29. I got re-interested in them through a project where I tried to come up with a "canon" of 100 important films for a friend. The final version, as I came up with it, is here, and the set of posts that documents the entire long process of brainstorming it can be found here. This made me realize how much I liked film, and how many important films I still hadn't seen.
30. I keep track of everything I see nowadays, and export the results to a webpage which can be viewed here. I try to do at least a short write-up of nearly everything I see and many of these get cross-posted to Netflix. My reviewer rank at Netflix, as of this writing, is 36,928, and if there's anything more self-involved than monitoring your Netflix reviewer rank, I don't know what it might be.

film club XXXIII: the adventures of mark twain

2008-07-09T14:20:09Z

So, following up on Svankmajer's Alice, this week Film Club tackled another "literary" animated film, The Adventures of Mark Twain, which is a far weirder film than it might initially appear.
The premise of the film is intriguing right out of the gate. Adventures is neither a biopic of Twain nor a straight-ahead adaptation of Twain's work, but rather both of these, set in the context of a third thing: an adventure tale in which Twain pilots an airship into space to observe Halley's Comet.

That's odd enough as an artistic choice, but the film complicates the story considerably by having Twain be joined by three stowaways: Twain's own fictional characters Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Becky Thatcher.

So, OK, this is enough to qualify the film as a kid-friendly entrant in the series of films we did a while back that combine re-enactments of a writer's work with the story of a writer's life in various complicated ways (American Splendor, Adaptation, The Hours, and Naked Lunch). And this business wherein fictional characters meet their creator collapses two layers of reality, which always has the potential to be deeply fraught. If the characters recognize what's going on, they're going to realize something about their own status as fictions, and this leads into some pretty tricky existential problems. After all, What would you ask if given the potential to directly address your creator? [I'm reminded here of the culmination of Grant Morrison's run on the comic book Animal Man, in which Animal Man, who has had his wife and children murdered during Morrison's run, essentially asks "Why did you make me suffer?" Morrison's response is honest, yet cruel: because it helps sell comic books.]
Anyway, the film flirts with this possibility—there's a "Table of Contents" on the main deck that the passengers can use to access re-enactments of Twain's works:

...and at one point they notice "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" listed in there (as well as the "Injun Joe" episode from Huck Finn's life).

However, they avoid drawing any ontologically-problematic conclusions from this. That's not to say that the film never gets dark. Twain aficionados will know that Twain was born in 1835, when Halley's Comet passed by the earth, and that he correctly predicted that he would die when the comet returned. The film informs us of these details at its outset, and is completely explicit about the fact that the airship voyage is a one-way trip from which Twain will not return.

In this way the film begins to resemble a film like Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, a single extended meditation on the transition into death. The children recognize that they are being carried along on this voyage, and rightfully recognize that this puts them in substantial peril: much of the film's conflict derives from their attempts to escape Twain's company and return to safety on the ground. At one point in the film, Sawyer, freely speculating about how the newspapers will describe their escape, conjures up the headline "Tom Sawyer, Aeronaut, Saves Airborne Friends From Madman's Deathwish," and by this point in the film Twain has, indeed, begun to be represented as a somewhat deranged figure, haunted, morbid, grief-obsessed.

The film highlights this even further by choosing to present adaptations of Twain's lesser-known and more esoteric or cynical works, including (most notably) the incomplete manuscript The Mysterious Stranger, a work which features Satan as the main character:

...and which emphasizes human suffering as a central thematic concern, which the film doesn't exactly skimp on representing:

This is pretty dark stuff for a young audience, and the resolution is "happy" only on a philosophical, near-mystical level, dealing with such concepts as literary immortality and reconciling the duality of the self:

In short, totally fascinating. Thinking of all this business regarding literary figures taken out of their usual context (and then using this as way to get at an extended meditation on death) put me in mind of Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which will be my pick for next week.

100 book challenge: part six: miscellany

2008-07-08T17:38:32Z

Down to the final fifteen of the 100 Book Challenge!
As long as we're coming out of the graphic design shelf, we might as well move into Beautiful Evidence, by design critic Edward Tufte
[I panned this book a bit when I first read it, believing it to re-hash some of the material from Tufte's earlier books. However, that also makes it the easiest one to select if I'm going to take just one. It is probably the most well-designed one of the batch.]
Re-Search #11: Pranks!
[Back in the good old days of the mid-nineties, Re-Search was the ultimate arbiter of what was cool and underground, and I'm grateful to them to introducing me to a lot of different countercultural thinkers. Of the Re-Search volumes I have, this is the one that meant the most to me, but Angry Women, Modern Primitives, and the Industrial Culture Handbook are all just about equally worth bringing.]
Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge
[Along the same lines as the Re-Search books, this was a book that taught the young Jeremy about what was cool. (The book's main answer to that question: geeks and psychedelic shit.) Some of the tech romance has lost its luster in the, er, fifteen or so years since this book came out, but I'm more than willing to hold onto it as perhaps the single volume that best explains how I ended up the way I did.]
Along these same "formative" lines, I'm not sure I can part with any of what I consider to be the three key Advanced Dungeons and Dragons texts: the Dungeon Master's Guide, the Player's Handbook, and Monster Manual.
[I haven't played Dungeons and Dragons in probably five years now, but these three books basically describe how to generate and stock an entire fictional world, and determines coherent rules for how players can interact with that world: the amount of entertainment that can be extracted from their triangulation is truly limitless. A book that strips away the fantasy trappings in an attempt to provide an even broader basis for world-building is the GURPS Basic Set, which I'm also tempted to bring but which I don't think would make a list that caps at 100.]
Continuing with games, I'd bring the Redstone Editions Surrealist Games book-in-a-box...
...and the Oulipo Compendium, which defines a mind-boggling number of literary constraints to play around with...
...and Jeff Noon's Cobralingus, which takes the idea of literary constraints and fascinatingly updates it by mashing it up with the kind of gate/filter/patch mechanism familiar from real-time sound synthesis programs like AudioMulch.
And ultimately, for when I was through with the wacky wordplay and wanted to get back to writing normal English-language sentences, I'd bring a copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.

I'd cram in a few more great works of fiction...
Cathedral, by Raymond Carver
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
my version of Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
[My edition has great illustrations by Rockwell Kent, circa 1930.]
...and one excellent work of humor: Our Dumb Century: 100 Years of Headlines from America's Finest News Source
...and maybe one exemplary picture book for children: The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van Allsburg

And that'd be 100 (OK, closer to 115, given the various cheats and bundles I stuck in there.) Could I live with this 100? Maybe, although there's a lot of good writing in the piles left that remain. I find myself already wanting to make a list of a second hundred... the "honorable mentions," perhaps...

100 book challenge: part five: comics, art books, graphic design

2008-07-07T17:00:39Z

Thirty books left to go in the 100 Book Challenge!
Last time I left off on the cusp of "comics," so let's proceed into that realm. I'm fortunate that a lot of the comics I want to bring are actually in comics form, in long-boxes under my bed, and are thus exempt from the purge. But in terms of "trade paperbacks," let's see.
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
[Totally essential; besides being a gripping thriller, this is also a decade-by-decade history of the archetype of the "costumed hero" in the twentieth century, with an appreciation of the form of the "horror comic" thrown in to boot. It's also one of the best examinations of what it means to be an aging superhero; in this regard it is joined by Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, which I'd bring if I hadn't lost my copy somewhere.]
From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell
[If I can bring another Moore, I'd pick this paranormal retelling of the Jack the Ripper story.]
Read Yourself Raw, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly
[A giant, oversized version volume collecting selections of the first three issues of "the comics magazine for damned intellectuals." My introduction to Spiegelman, Charles Burns, Mark Beyer, Gary Panter, and Windsor McCay. Speaking of whom....]
Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend, by Windsor McCay
[Surreal, fantastic dream comics, circa 1904 (predating Surrealism by a comfortable margin).]
Rabid Eye: The Dream Art of Rick Veitch, by Rick Veitch
[More dream comics, these circa 1996. But no less fantastic.]
Cheating: I have most of the run of G. B. Trudeau's Doonesbury in a series of volumes: The Portable Doonesbury, The People's Doonesbury, The Doonesbury Chronicles, etc. Any of the individual volumes might not be that valuable, but together they make a form of the Great American Novel.
Another cheat: volumes 4, 5, and 6 of the book-sized comics anthology Kramer's Ergot
[Probably the most important comics anthology since those 80s RAW volumes. I'm not sure I could part with a volume.]
And another cheat: volumes 1-4 of Joss Whedon / John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men
[I've been reading a lot of comics this year, and I'm prepared to say that, although this isn't high art, it's probably the best stuff that mainstream comics is putting out these days.]
American Splendor Presents: Bob and Harv's Comics, by Robert Crumb and Harvey Pekar
[Crumb and Pekar are both essential comics creators, and getting both of them, at the top of their respective games, makes this volume a must-keep.]
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware
[Ware's world-view is bleak enough to nearly constitute a form of comedy, but there's no doubt that he's an absolute master of comics form and vocabulary.]
Monkey Vs. Robot, by James Kochalka
[A little bit of brilliant minimalist stuff... his American Elf collection is also great, but I have that in individual-issue form.]
The Frank Book, by Jim Woodring
[Jim Woodring drew my LiveJournal user icon, a character named Frank who roams about in a creepy, psychologically-rich cartoon universe. This stuff is a good example of the kind of things that can really only be done in comics (they've been turned into animated films, but their eerie, airless logic works best on the page).]

The Frank Book is a big coffee-table style book, so let's transition and throw a few more of those into here:
Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective
[Published by the Guggenheim, this 632-page tome contains somewhere around 500 color reproductions of Rauschenberg's work, and another couple hundred in black-and-white. This is also probably the most expensive book I have ever bought for myself (and it would be even more expensive to replace, apparently.) Worth it, though: Rauschenberg, to me, is one of the key artists of the 20th century, bringing together (in a single figure) strands of Abstract Expressionist, Pop, and Fluxus.]
Paul Klee
[Another Guggenheim edition. Klee is another of my favorite visual artists, and although this volume isn't as comprehensive as the Rauschenberg one, it's well worth hanging on to.]
I'll bundle two graphic design books here as a final cheat: Sonic: Visuals for Music and 1 + 2 Color Designs, Vol. 2. Neither one is a masterpiece, which is part of how I can justify bundling them, but I do flip through them fairly frequently when needing ideas for graphic design projects, and books of this sort are expensive, and thus a pain to replace.]

Fifteen books left to go, and what's left in the collection? Mostly just miscellany. Stay tuned!

100 book challenge: part four: essays and cultural criticism

2008-07-04T16:46:29Z

Moving on with the 100 Book Challenge, we come to the "essays" area. I don't have a huge selection here, but these would be my picks:
I Remember, by Joe Brainard
[Perhaps the simplest organizing principle for a memoir ever: a sequence of sentences, each of which begin with the words "I remember." Yet somehow it works.]
The Size of Thoughts, by Nicholson Baker
[This book is full of great pieces, including Baker's hilarious review of the Dictionary of American Slang and his lament on the disappearance of the card catalog.]
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace
[Not quite as good as the exemplary Consider the Lobster, but I don't have a copy of Lobster—I read the library's copy—and this one is also great.]
I'd also probably bring the giant anthology Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Philip Lopate, which has key selections by people like George Orwell, Joan Didion, M.F.K. Fisher, etc., and thus eliminates the need for a lot of individual volumes.

Essays slide nicely into the critical writing section of my library, so let's head there....
Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin
[This book is full of interesting ideas and key essays, but it also has deep sentimental value for me.]
America, by Jean Baudrillard
[I find the central argument here to be incomprehensible, but in a provocative, distinctly "Baudrillardian" fashion. Like a piece of heady SF in its way. See also his The Gulf War Did Not Happen, which I could part with but which holds similar pleasures.]
Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault
[Probably the key Foucault to hang onto.]
Mythologies, by Roland Barthes
[And this the key Barthes.]
The Postmodern Condition, by Jean-Francois Lyotard
[...and this the key Lyotard.]
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, by Donna Haraway
[Contains the great Cyborg Manifesto and a number of excellent critiques of the ideological biases inherent to the sciences.]
A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, by Manuel Delanda
[Between this and Patrik Ourednik's Europeana, one doesn't need any other history books.]
Temporary Autonomous Zone, by Hakim Bey
[Does this belong in fringe ideas or cultural criticism? It's a little of both, but totally freakin' brilliant. Life-altering.]

Moving on into some more straightforward literary and media criticism...
Literary Theory, by Terry Eagleton
[An overview of the main literary theory movements of the last hundred years, written in a style that's clear enough that a bright undergraduate could grasp every word of it.]
Postmodernist Fiction, by Brian McHale
[A good argument about what postmodernist fiction is, what it does, and why it's doing it. I'd also include Marjorie Perloff's Radical Artifice here, a similar argument about experimental poetics, but I don't own a copy.]
Half-Real, by Jesper Juul
[The best piece of video-game criticism I've read to date.]
Rules of Play, by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman
[Not exactly a piece of video-game criticism, more a design handbook, but a key text for "game studies" anyway.]
Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud
[Yet, oddly, I might pass on McLuhan's Understanding Media, which has not dated especialy well and in some ways is a model for everything cultural criticsm does poorly.]

That's seventeen—and since I'm trying to stick to round numbers for this project I'll include three pieces of fiction I overlooked this first time around: the bizarre Sixty Stories, by Donald Barthelme, the classic Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, and a piece of fun, dense SF, Accelerando by Charles Stross (which I reviewed here.) That brings us to twenty for today, and the running total for the project overall to seventy. I'll move on from the McCloud into the "comics" shelf next.

book challenge part three: religion, new age, fringe science, and science

2008-07-02T15:53:55Z

Still in the process of [at least theoretically] culling my book collection down to 100 key books. Moving on down the shelf takes us through Drama—my drama selection is pretty patchy and under-appreciated; I'm not sure that any of the scattering of volumes I have would be worth including in the final 100. If I had a good volume of Shakespeare's plays I'd take that, but I don't. Moving on.
The next couple of shelves are religion, "new age"-type stuff, and fringe science. Here are my picks from that area:
The Grove Press "Pocket Canons" Books of the Bible box set.
[I should be honest and acknowledge that I'll almost certainly never read the entire Bible, but reading these twelve books every few years is feasible and desirable.]
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, by Gershom Scholem
[This book took me forever to get through, but was incredibly rewarding. There are so many strange ideas in the history of Judaism, and this book is a fascinating overview.]
A History of God, by Karen Armstrong
[Contains just about everything you'll ever need to know about the three major monotheistic religions.]
The I Ching, or Book of Changes (Wilhelm / Baynes translation)
[Carl Jung claimed that this book was alive. Philip K. Dick claimed that this book could not predict the future, but could rather provide an accurate diagnosis of the present, from which probable futures could be extracted. Anything I could add would be extraneous.]
The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, edited by Lawrence Sutin
[If anything, Dick's non-fiction is even more interesting and loopy than his fiction. This book contains a lot of Dick's thoughts on spirituality, synchronicity, and reality: great stuff. I'd also find it hard to part with In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis, the book that editor Lawrence Sutin valiantly attempted to carve out of Dick's 8,000 page journal documenting his mystical experience.]
Cosmic Trigger Volume One: Final Secret of the Illuminati, by Robert Anton Wilson
[For better or for worse, Cosmic Trigger changed my life, and although I'm a little more distanced from Wilson these days, this volume is still a real gold mine of high weirdness.]

Let's move on down into the science books...
Metamagical Themas, by Douglas R. Hofstadter
[Godel, Escher, Bach is more renowned, but this book, which collects Hofstadter's Scientific American columns from 1981-1983, has just as many fascinating ideas, and in more digestible form. Language, self-referentiality, fonts, game theory, geometric art... this thing is like a laundry list of geek interests. Plus it is the book that taught me the game Nomic.]
Emergence, by Steven Johnson
[A good, readable introduction to the science of complexity and self-organization.]
Chaos, by James Gleick
[Great pictures of fractals, and still (to my mind) the best introductory book on this particular branch of science. I also own Mandelbrot's The Fractal Geometry of Nature, which is wonderful to look at, but a bit over my head.]
Li: Dynamic Form in Nature
[A tiny little book—basically an impulse-buy kind of thing—documenting "surface patterns" in nature—crystal designs, cat markings, vascular structures in leaves, etc. Those are the kinds of patterns I'm attracted to, so this book is pretty important to me. Since it's small, I'll throw in its sister volume, Sacred Geometry, a similar-sized volume on the harmonic mathematics of ritual spaces.]

This brings me right up to the halfway point: 50 books, 50 to go.

film club XXXII: Alice

2008-07-01T19:28:21Z

Those of you who try to keep your eye on subcultures (or who have ever been inside a Hot Topic) may have noticed that there's a faction within the Goth subculture that embraces cute shit. There's something about the space where cute shit meets morbidity that creates a very fertile delta, that a lot of creators have been mining for over two decades now: think of Jhonen Vazquez's Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, or Roman Dirge's Lenore, or anything by Junko Mizuno. The King of Goth Cute, however—the only purveyor of the aesthetic to burst through to the mainstream—is Tim Burton, with his two animated films Corpse Bride (2005) and The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) serving as canonical examples of the form. (The animation pedant in me has to mention that the actual director of Christmas is not Burton at all but rather animator Henry Selick, but Burton's involvement with the film is so thorough that he's generally considered to be the auteur at work there.)
In any case. This week Film Club looked at Jan Svankmajer's Alice, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland created with a mix of live action and stop-motion animation. Certainly it is possible to do a fairly straight-up animated adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, something without any real taint of darkness, in a vein we might call "Straight Cute." (Disney's already done the definitive Straight Cute version, with their cel-animation Alice, back in 1951.) It is also, however, a story that seems ripe for a Goth Cute adaptation: girls are cute, but a lost girl is Goth Cute. Nor is it difficult to imagine Goth Cute stop-motion versions of any of the book's characters: whimsical, yet slightly creepy, the kind of thing that could be converted into a cool vinyl toy.
Svankmajer's adaptation is interested in the dark side of the story, no doubt. But don't go into this thinking that it's going to be cute. Svankmajer's version is from 1988, when Goth Cute, as a movement, basically doesn't exist. (Burton's Beetlejuice had just come out, Edward Scissorhands and Nightmare Before Christmas are still years away, and Jhonen Vasquez is 14 years old.) And Svankmajer is from Czechoslovokia, a country not exactly renowned for its cute export. (It's no Japan, let's put it that way.) Svankmajer's characters are creepy, but not exactly Cute creepy... here's his White Rabbit, for instance:

...which I'm fairly sure is just an actual dead rabbit with some kind of armature taxidermied inside it. Svankmajer highlights this with a pretty dramatic departure from Carroll's book, namely: the Rabbit makes its first appearance uprooting himself from a specimen case.

If you look closely at the second screencap there you'll see the nails in his paws, which he has to literally pull out with his teeth:

So... yeah. That's not the only time Svankmajer uses some kind of taxidermied thing to stand in for a character...

(The animation pedant in me again has to speak up and point out that the use of dead things are actually part of the tradition when it comes to stop-motion, dating all the way back to pioneer Ladislas Starevich, who is animating dead beetles way back in 1908. Check out the elaborate and strange narrative The Cameraman's Revenge (1912), available for viewing at UBUWeb.)
Even Alice herself isn't really "cute," as such. She's actually got a fairly severe, determined-looking face:

...which is a good match for the fairly severe, determined-looking doll that she turns into when she eats the transfiguring tarts (again, not particularly cute).

And I don't even really know what to say about this:

So, as far as Alice adaptations or hypothetical Alice adaptations go, this one is reasonably grim and disturbing. The production design helps with this: everything is dark, and nearly everything is filthy:

And there are times when the film evokes nothing as strongly as sequences in American horror films: these screenshots seem less to be taking place in Wonderland and more like they're taking place in Freddy Kruger's lair or a squalid set from one of the Saw films:

None of this is said to disparage Alice, which is actually completely compelling on its own terms. However, I will say that I'm looking forward to our next foray into animated literary adaptation, which promises to be a little more, er, light, although perhaps no less odd: we're going to do Will Vinton's The Adventures of Mark Twain, in which a Claymation Twain and some of his characters foray off in a spaceship to visit Halley's Comet.

100 book challenge: part two: poetry

2008-06-30T19:06:22Z

Still toying with the idea of trying to figure out which books I would keep, if I were to limit myself to 100. Last week I figured out 25 works of fiction I'd want to keep; here are some selections from the Poetry shelf.

Veil: New and Selected Poems by Rae Armantrout
[Armantrout's poems are enigmatic, delicate, and careful—she may be my favorite living poet.]
My Life, by Lyn Hejinian
[This is perhaps the most interesting and important poetic project of the last, say, 25 years.]
Deer Head Nation, by K. Silem Mohammad
[Back in 2007, I wrote that this book, part of the "Flarf" / "Google-sculpting" genre, was "one of the best new books of poetry to emerge in the last ten years." I stand by that.]
This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, by Juliana Spahr
[Another important book, this pair of poems has a better grip on the key questions of the contemporary moment than almost any other book in my entire collection. Longer write-up here.]
The Tunnel: Selected Poems, by Russel Edson
[Edson's demented little stories, like psycho-sexually rewired fairy tales, are a longtime favorite of mine. This is another book where just opening to any page and beginning to read is pretty certain to be rewarding. Random opening line, to test this theory: "A piece of a man had broken off in the road."]
How to Write, by Gertrude Stein
[Not sure what to say about this book, except that it's not really about how to write. The classic Stein text is probably Tender Buttons, which I wrote up here and here, but don't actually own. Anyway, this one, also great, will do in a pinch.]
Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania, edited by Jerome Rothenberg
[Classic 1968 ethnopoetic anthology. Reads like a weird alternative Bible.]
Postmodern American Poetry, edited by Paul Hoover
[A good Who's Who of interesting poets working today.]
The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion: A Trilogy, by Leslie Scalapino
[I've always loved Scalapino (I in fact made her Wikipedia page), and this book is a good example of why. Hard to describe, but I'd say it's like what you'd get if you ran a kind of important modern novel about globalism through some kind of syntax re-ambiguator?]
A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, by Tom Phillips
[If you're not familiar with this bizarre text, do yourself a favor and run a Google Image Search on "humument" right now. Use this link, if you want.]
Human Wishes, by Robert Hass
[This list is heavy on the experimental stuff, so here's what is, to me, a five-star book of more traditional lyrical poems about everyday life.
A Book of Luminous Things, by Czeslaw Milosz
[Another one for the traditionalists. Love poems, haiku, lyrical meditations—standard stuff, but well-selected here, and I think one needs some more emotional and less academic stuff to round out the picks.]
Darkness Moves, by Henri Michaux
[This French poet isn't that well-known, but his poems are blend of Surrealism, drug writing, and cerebral fantasy that I find absolutely hits me in my pleasure center every time. Sample line: "Infinite are the passages from fog to flesh in Meidosem country."]
Howl, by Allen Ginsburg
[One of the greatest books of poems of the 20th century. Nothing more to add.]
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
[I also would like to bring along really good volumes collecting William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, Ezra Pound, or John Ashbery, but aside from the Stevens I don't own any of these books, so I don't need to worry about which get the nod and which don't.]

That's fifteen—added to the twenty-five fiction titles brings us to forty. Sixty more to go.

100 book challenge: part one: fiction

2008-06-28T17:51:05Z

Here are the first 25 picks, all from the Fiction shelves.
The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker
[One of my favorite authors, and this is my favorite novel by him.]
Labyrinths, by Jorge Luis Borges
[This book has enough provocative, imaginative ideas in it to last one a lifetime simply by itself.]
The Age of Wire and String, by Ben Marcus
[Still a book I grab on a regular basis to read random passages out loud to people.]
Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino
[Like Labyrinths, this is a book that opens up onto a nearly infinite "possibility space."]
If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, by Italo Calvino [The other really essential Calvino novel.]
Story of the Eye, by Georges Bataille
[A 1928 pornographic novel so mindbending it borders on the Surrealist.]
Crash, by J.G. Ballard
[If we're bringing along experimental pornography, we should definitely include this.]
Naked Lunch, by William Burroughs
[And this.]
I'm going to cheat here, and count Burroughs' "Cut-Up Trilogy" (Nova Express, Soft Machine, and The Ticket That Exploded) as one volume
Another cheat: William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive).
I actually don't need to cheat on this one, because I have the single volume that collects The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, by Douglas Adams, but it's really the first only the first volume that matters deeply to me. I can, however, see myself enjoying re-reading the others at some point.
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
[I've still never made it all the way through all three of these, but it's good to bring an unfinished book along with some of the faves, and good to have a book you could feasibly read out loud for a year.]
The Annotated Alice, by Lewis Carroll [annotations by Martin Gardner]
[Another good out-loud book, plus it's essential to have at least one book on hand that could entertain children. Having Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass together in one volume make this an absolutely indispensible choice. Not to mention the annotations, which are fascinating.]
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace
[I'm not entirely sure that I'll ever re-read this, but there are some great bits in it that often pop up in my mind, and I'd like to be able to refer to those bits at some point.]
The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon [I'll include Gravity's Rainbow later, if there's room]
Underworld, by Don DeLillo
[Maybe my favorite "realistic" novel of the last 100 years.]
White Noise, by Don DeLillo
[Fights with Underworld for the title.]
Time's Arrow, by Martin Amis
[My favorite Amis novel, and the most successful and beautiful extended meditation on the flow of time that I've ever read.]
Blindness, by Jose Saramogo
[Like Time's Arrow, this is a book that's effectively a fantasy, but nevertheless profoundly captures both the horror and the beauty of real-life humanity.]
Europeana, by Patrik Ourednik
[An experimental novel that's also a concise history of the 20th century.]
Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
[Or maybe Pale Fire? Whew, tough choice.]
Valis, by Philip K. Dick
[Far and away the best of his novels.]
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist by Mark Leyner
[An indescribable mish-mash of cyberpunk, experimental poetry, and humor writing.]
Schrodinger's Cat, by Robert Anton Wilson
[More coherent and more intellectually provocative than the cluttered Illuminatus Trilogy.]
Magic For Beginners, by Kelly Link
[A weird but often delightful collection of fantastical short stories.]

Next up: poetry.

100 book challenge

2008-06-27T14:24:33Z

So in the Red Eye a couple of days ago was an article on something called the "100 Thing Challenge"—which caught my eye at first because I thought it was a spin on my long-running 100 Favorite Things exercise.
It is and it isn't. It's an article on one person's attempt to simplify his life by reducing his personal belongings to 100 things. This appealed to me, probably foremostly because I'm preparing a cross-country move in a few weeks, and so the idea of reducing my belongings has been much on my mind lately.
But 100 items only? Sheesh, I thought to myself, I don't think I could reduce even just my books to 100, much less everything else. (It actually turns out, if you look at the original post from the guy who came up with the challenge, that he's allowing himself books as an exception, so that's heartening.)
But it did get me to thinking: if I tried to reduce down to 100 books, what are the ones I would choose? I have a lot of books that I cart around from apartment to apartment to apartment, more for their decorative value than anything else. Many (most?) of them I don't think I'll ever re-read (and if I was struck by the sudden impulse to re-read them, I could probably go get them out of a library). But there are some that I do refer to regularly, or plan to re-read, or use for teaching, or otherwise just can't bring myself to part with. But is that category larger than 100?
I think I'll make a list of the 100 "must-saves," and see how I feel about the "leftovers." A complete list or list in progress will likely appear here soon.
See also: the LibraryThing Swap this Book feature; BookCrossing; and my own lament, last year, about what to do with all the CDs clogging up my living quarters (a problem I'm still in the process of solving).

film club XXXI: spirited away

2008-06-23T16:58:04Z

So, sadly, we had to give up on Funeral Parade of Roses... my eBay purchase never made it here, and after a month and a half of waiting I eventually needed to request a refund, and Film Club had to pick up where we left off, which was with Ghost In The Shell way back in early May.
Co-founder Skunkcabbage decided to move us onwards down the anime path, suggesting we take a look at Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001).
This was maybe my fourth time seeing Spirited Away, and I really think it's a great movie for children (in addition to being just a great movie in the more general, all-around sense). I thought a lot about why this might be, and eventually realized that the movie is all about ontological instability.
Ontological instability is a fancy description of a condition wherein the fundamental existence of things is mutable, in flux, or otherwise suspect. As adults, we like to pretend that our worlds and our identities are fundamentally stable: that things have a kind of permanence that can be existentially "banked on." Children, however, don't have the luxury of being able to assume that the world is in any way stable, for the obvious reason that the early years of a child's life are spent undergoing Cronenbergian levels of intense developmental changes, taking in massive amounts of new information, and trying to decode the rules imposed upon you by adults, rules which doubtlessly appear to be capricious and incomprehensible. Spirited Away, then, like its most obvious influence, Alice In Wonderland, is essentially a parable about trying to negotiate your way through a fluctuating world while at the mercy of these assorted complications.
The story begins with our protagonist, Chihiro, moving to a new town (a familiar instance of the kinds of radical change that parents commonly visit upon their children). You can pretty much see at a glance how enthused Chihiro is about this idea:

Before long, they've made a wrong turn, and they come upon a strange complex of seemingly abandoned buildings. No one can quite determine what their purpose is, and their mystery further unsettles Chihiro, although her parents respond essentially blithely to it (Chihiro's father, operating in a typically adult male mode, attempts to establish ontological stability by declaring (wrongly) that the buildings must be part of a theme park abandoned in a 1990s economic crisis).

This setting will prove to be one site of radical instability or flux in the film, which ends up being effectively illustrated by the motif of water. As they first explore it, there's no water present: there is, in fact, a dry riverbed running through the middle of it.

But then at nightfall there's a river there:

And then two days later it's actually become an entire ocean:

It's not merely the world that's mutable and impermanent, however, but Chihiro's own identity as well. Not long after the world has begun its shift, Chihiro threatens to fade out into pure nothingness (one possible terminal point of ontological instability):

Eventually she finds a way to keep her form, but that's not the last time the film casts her status as an individual into doubt. She negotiates the world well enough to eventually encounter its ruler, Yubaba (it's worth mentioning, as a sidenote, that Yubaba—all jewels, makeup, cigarettes, and unpredictable rage—is pretty much a walking incarnation of the things that children find mysterious / grotesque about old people):

She agrees to put Chihiro to work, and in doing so, she alters one of the key markers of Chihiro's ontological permanence. Specifically, she changes Chihiro's name, literally lifting the kanji from the page:

Chihiro's not the only character who suffers from radical instability: did I mention that her parents are turned into pigs?

There are other examples as well, probably most notably the character of Haco, who may or may not be her ally (and who at various points in the film may be a boy, a dragon, or a river). It all adds up to a memorable evocation of the often traumatic (but occasionally pleasurable) experience of attempting to negotiate an unstable world from an unstable subject position. Again I'm reminded of Alice in Wonderland, which leads me to the announcement of next week's pick: the semi-animated 1988 Alice adaptation created by Czech filmmaker Jan Svankmajer. Stay tuned!

100 favorite things (2008 edition)

2008-06-20T16:28:04Z

Hi there, I'm back.

While away, I did some interesting things (including a one-day vow of silence). But I also did my roughly annual 100-favorite-things list, which, as usual, I'll post here. It is written in long chain of association, which may be decodeable by the astute reader:

indexes, index cards, card catalogs
taxonomies + lists
notebooks, blank books, composition books
digital search
journals + diaries
weblogs + livejournals
the comic "achewood"
reading
studying
projects
the spring conference
receiving positive attention
giving positive attention
not being bored
feeling competent / feeling powerful
feeling like others perceive me as dangerous / alluring
feeling like others perceive me as caring / kind / nonjudgmental
resisting dichotomies
dancing + dance music
drones + drone music
altered states
listening to music while [in an altered state]
having a beer in the afternoon in an unfamiliar city
travelling
roadtrips with a close friend
the landscape of the american west
forests
trails and hikes
the path between april + thor's driveway and their front door
urban walks
exploring abandoned buildings
tunnels, passages, hidden spaces
mazes + labyrinths
dungeons and dragons + its culture + paraphenalia
games in general: board games, card games, video games
rust, moss, decay, mold
taking photographs
birdsong
the movie "george washington"
the movie "slacker"
conversations
listening
group improvisation
being among a group that is functioning well together
being alone
having ideas
feeling creative
writing
laptop computers
managing my music in iTunes
adobe photoshop + adobe illustrator
del.icio.us, flickr, and other web 2.0-type services
the internet more broadly
katamari damacy
cute shit
the idea of time travel / time travel narratives
grant morrison's comics
the marvel universe + its culture + paraphenalia
jokes and being thought of as funny
fonts
the puzzle-solving elements of graphic design
making everyday activities into a game
self-improvement
receiving recommendations from others
cycles
swimming naked
exhibitionists
touching others
being touched
venus
ganesh
thoth
altars, ritual objects, charms
unitarians + quakers
smokers
greasy spoons
good coffeehouses
free wi-fi
long-form serial narrative
buffy the vampire slayer
subcultures
sleeping next to someone
flirting
long-running relationships
the fundamental variety of other people
sharing food
desserts, esp. ice cream + chocolate
watching movies + having movie-watching projects
being busy buy not feeling behind
having knowledge / the unknown
manipulating data
invented languages
silly songs
coming out of depression / feeling optimistic
epiphanies
good memories / the promise of good things to come
the world

More reflections to come in a bit.

hiatus

2008-06-04T15:46:23Z

I'm off to my annual journey to New Hampshire for Spring, the conference / temporary autonomous zone / adult camp that I've been involved with for the last eight years. Consequently, all blogs will likely be on hiatus until mid-June.
Some of my photos from past Springs are available here, if you want to get some kind of idea of what I'll be up to.

depression in comics, part two

2008-05-31T16:59:52Z

Way back when, I promised a second post on "Depression in Comics," and then I got busy with traveling and the Blog-A-Thon, and it fell by the wayside.
So my second entrant in the series is not from the world of superhero comics but rather from the webcomics underground: specifically the comic Achewood. Achewood takes place in a fairly absurd universe, but creator Chris Onstad has used the recurring character of "Roast Beef" to do one of the most long-running investigations of depression that comics has to offer. [Beaten out only by Grand Prize Winner Charlie Brown?]
Here's Roast Beef in the early days, back in this strip from 2002:

And here's Roast Beef from this week, as he looks through an issue of Martha Stewart Weddings:

Roast Beef is really the character who got me hooked on Achewood, so it is only proper that he gets a shout out here, as we continue with our Raccoon Salute To: Depression In Comics!
This is a three-part series, but the third part will be a while in coming, for two reasons: one, I have to track down a copy of the graphic novel in question, and two, I am currently over 1,000 miles from my scanner.