Sleeping Jeremy

characters: 2000-2010

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:15:24 GMT

Here's a question I've been wanting to ask for a while: Who is your favorite fictional character-- from any form of media --whose first (or only) appearance was within the last ten years?

roadtrip music

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 03:59:01 GMT

Have been spending time this week digging through my current iTunes library (~12,000 songs) looking for the tracks that sound the best when on the road. Have come up with an "On The Road" playlist of around 2,400 songs. Now I just need a six-day roadtrip to test it all out.
[Note: I don't actually prefer giant playlists like that; they're too unshapely. So the On The Road playlist will actually form the raw material from which iTunes will auto-generate a "Smart Road Playlist," which will be a more-manageable 25 songs in total. So it can really be tested out perfectly fine on a shorter roadtrip of about two hours.]
Anyone want to recommend a favorite album to listen to while driving?

i made this, part three: "inevitable"

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:20:53 GMT

Inevitable is a board game, set in a slapstick dystopian future.
Inevitable is a work of commentary, satirizing the contemporary landscape of corporate and political power.
Inevitable is a device which uses what Matthew Kirschenbaum would call the "procedural granularity" of complex rule-systems to produce robust narrative experiences in a deep imaginary world.
"Inevitable is a game of layers within layers; the product of analysis, deconstruction, reconstruction, and meta-analysis. [It] overtly and covertly works to thwart you and subvert the board game experience overall." —Jonathan Leistiko, the game's co-designer.
So... what is Inevitable, really? It's something that I began designing a long time ago—the earliest sketches I own of Inevitable materials are from 1988. It's something I have continued to tinker with, on and off, throughout the years: it enjoyed heavy play and extended development with my college crew circa 1991-1993, and then went into a re-development process in 1999-2000, right after I finished up with graduate school. Now it's alive again, and slouching towards a commercial release. It has a dedicated website and you can follow it at Facebook.
Is it playable? It is playable! I just playtested it again this Sunday.

Is it perfect? No, it's not perfect. (These recent playtests have reminded me often of game designer Jesse Schell's "Rule of the Loop," in which he declares that "The more times you test and improve your design, the better your game will be.") But tinkering incrementally with a long-running piece of design feels strangely satisfying at this point in my life.

i made this, part two: a baby book

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 01:47:11 GMT

Not long ago, I wrote the following on Facebook: "As someone who does not have children and who does not particularly like babies, one would not think I would be a good person to illustrate a baby book. And yet I think I did a surprisingly good job."
Yes, it was an improbable turn. But my collaborator Amy L. Clark had written a baby book, and needed some illustrations, and I've been trying to draw more, so... we came together on it.
She wrote passages like this: "Eventually, you became a child. Most people are so busy being children that they end up being young people for a long time. There are important things to do during a childhood, some fun, some scary, some mysterious, some which require practice, many of which make a bit of a mess. You _______ and once you ________."
and I accompanied her passages with illustrations like this:

See four other illustrations (and the accompanying text) here. Copies of this baby book are not presently for sale, but if that changes you'll of course hear about it.

i made this, part one: "know your polyhedra" six-button set

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:48:07 GMT

OK, so this is the part where I start talking about things I've made, like I promised.
First up is my recently completed six-button set, "Know Your Polyhedra." Anyone who has done much in the way of tabletop gaming should instantly recognize the commonality between these six ~~dice~~ geometric solids:

They come in a nifty little packet with a hand-numbered inlay card:

Mostly I just wanted to show these off, but if you're enough of a math nerd or a gamer geek that these make you itch with desire, I'll shoot a set your way for $5.95—less than $1 per button! Just pop in on my humble Etsy storefront. The proceeds are going into the coffers of another gamer-related project that's in the pipe... but more on that later.

getting excited and making things

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:55:09 GMT

Not long ago, I ordered myself one of these shirts:

(I bought it here, if you want one of your own.)

It's a worthy sentiment to keep in mind during the current crisis. For me, it's a way of trying to turn what feels like a depressing indicator of failure—unemployment—into a source of creative ferment. It's a daily practice, that transmutation: it requires work. Sometimes I can manage to stay excited for the entire day and other times I hit the doldrums. But things are getting made. And I'm ready to start talking about some of them. (Some are still secrets.) So over the next few days I'll use this blog as a showcase for some things I made. And I want to know: what are you making? Show me.

top-secret dance off: dance quest one

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:39:37 GMT

As promised, I am doing this. Behold!

Find more videos like this on Top Secret Dance Off

top-secret dance off

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 11:57:26 GMT

...or, how game mechanics can inspire cultural behavior

I am so totally going to do this.

on subject matter

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:40:25 GMT

"I turned to collage early, to get away from writing poems about my overwhelming mother. I felt I needed to do something 'objective' that would get me out of myself.
"I would take a novel, take one or two words from every page, and try to make a structure. But when I looked at the collage poems a while later: they were still about my mother.
"This was a revelation—and a liberation. I realized that subject matter is not something to worry about. Our concerns and obsessions will surface no matter what we do."
—Rosmarie Waldrop, "Collage and the First-Person Singular"
A nice, lengthy essay about Waldrop's use of collage can be read here.

film club: the diving bell and the butterfly

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:37:14 GMT

So here's this week's Film Club pick, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Netflix summarizes it thusly:
"In 1995, author and Elle magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby suffered a stroke that put him in a coma; he awakened mute and completely paralyzed. Mathieu Amalric stars in this adaptation of Bauby's autobiography, which he dictated by blinking."
That should maybe have a spoiler warning on it, since these two sentences encapsulate the central narrative arc of the film, from beginning to end. (The movie fleshes out its run-time with some stuff about Bauby's relationship with his wife, mistress, father, children, and friends, but the dictation of the book is the strongest through-line, and the one granted the most classical resolution.)
So, even if you only know that much, you essentially know the entire story. And then Netflix's summary goes on, revealing the film's theme and overall tenor: something about it being a "poignant film about the strength of the human spirit." This doesn't really constitute an additional spoiler because "the strength of the human spirit" is a cliche, and if we're going to be watching a film about a paralyzed guy who writes a memoir by blinking, the only way it's not going to be about the strength of the human spirit is if it's made by the Kids in the Hall.
None of this is to call out the poor Netflix synopsis-writers; I'm sure they have more serious things to worry about. It's to make the point that this film faces a real dilemma at the outset. We know how the story ends, and we know that the central thematic motif of that story is, well, "shopworn" is putting it kindly. So the challenge becomes: how can you take a film that in synopsis sounds like a Lifetime TV movie and pitch it to an art-house audience—an audience that (at least theoretically) is supposed to be more adventurous in its narrative and thematic tastes?
Well, the film's French, which probably helps.
But to find a more serious answer, we have to turn to an appreciation of the film's craft. Having been trained as a fiction-writer, I often approach films from the perspective of analyzing what works and what doesn't in the film's narrative. But the director of Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel, is trained as a painter, and so a more appropriate method might be to try to appreciate the film's "painterly" qualities. In this regard, the film is not a series of stale cliches, but rather a smashing success, especially in its opening scenes, which masterfully manipulate focal depth, color, and light:

There's something else that Schnabel does from a craft perspective, and it involves an exceptionally canny control over the usage of point-of-view, at least for the first third of the film. Bear with me for a minute while I explicate...

After his stroke, protagonist Bauby suffers from something they refer to in the film as "locked-in syndrome." Schnabel perceives a relationship between locked-in syndrome and cinematic spectation: like Bauby, we, the film's viewers, can perceive things, but are prohibited from interacting with them. To cement this relationship, Schnabel chooses to present the majority of the early portion of the film in first-person POV shots.

This sort of extended use of the first-person POV has been experimented with in the past rather dubiously— see: Lady in the Lake (1942) —but that was a film which promised to put you "in the action," which feels awkward in a passive medium like the cinema (it works great in an interactive medium like video games, though not when those video games are translated back into first-person film experiments). Schnabel's film, in effect, promises the opposite: it puts you in "the inaction," which works surprisingly well (perhaps most viscerally in a striking, memorable sequence in which Bauby has his right eye sewn shut to prevent infection).
Schnabel cheats a little, breaking from a strictly naturalistic POV by using effects like jump cuts (which could arguably be said to have a rough analogue in the way our vision works, but it'd be a stretch), and by bringing people so unnaturally close that they'd practically have to be bumping noses with Bauby. This is maybe plausible when it's his wife:

...but a bit less believable when it's his doctor:

These deviations have their effect, though: they contribute to an overall sense of disorientation and invasive presence, both of which help to get the viewer into Bauby's head (and body) better than a strict adherence to first-person POV might have done on its own.
Eventually, the film quietly begins to move us out of the subjective POV and into an objective, third-person POV. We start getting shots like this:

...which increase in both frequency and duration throughout the first third of the film. As a viewer, attuning yourself to your consciousness' flow into and out of Bauby's body is an odd experience: it is as though you are some kind of restless spirit. Adding to this are the moves into and out of memories (via flashbacks) and into and out of Bauby's imagination (via fantasy sequences)—it's safe to say that the film strives to get its audience to be aware of itself as a living perceptual apparatus, which is a damn sight more interesting than getting its audience to be aware of the "strength of the human spirit." It's also a generous approach to filmmaking, one that—at its (unsustained) best—invites comparison to avant-garde work which goes further with drawing attention to the audience's status as perceptual agents (Stan Brakhage's work is the best example I can summon to mind).
Schnabel shouldn't be faulted for not making an avant-garde film, though, especially when he's able to use his manipulation of POV for such striking narrative effects. One notable effect is that Schnabel navigates us through over a third of the film before we ever get to see what our protagonist looks like, in the present—this is something that most films, of course, provide within the first few minutes. By the point where we finally get an unobstructed view of his face we've already become familiar with him as a lively, handsome man in flashbacks and fantasies, and seeing him with the distorted features of the stroke victim comes as a vivid shock, even if you're expecting it. At this moment—which essentially constitutes the "turning point" that most films put at the end of their first act—the film chooses to move us suddenly outside the consciousness of Bauby himself, and abruptly into the consciousness of someone who knows him from before and is experiencing the shock of seeing him transformed. (It fits, not least because the middle third of the film is largely occupied with the changing relationship between Bauby and his network of loved ones.)
So. As a story, not that compelling, but it's a finely-wrought piece of cinematic art. This might lead to an interesting follow-up question—something about the decision to transform someone else's suffering / disability into a beautiful aesthetic object?—but let's hold off on that until next week.
Next week: a very different portrayal of disability, Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun (1971).

the nightmare

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 12:05:43 GMT

(I actually did have a vivid nightmare last night, but this wasn't it)

collaborative personalities

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:12:59 GMT

Earlier today:

Seriously, though, I really was surprised that seemingly no one has attempted to make a taxonomy of collaborative types. "Types of collaborators" yields 2,040 hits, few of them very useful. (By contrast, "types of assholes" yields 3,810, including "1 result stored on your computer.")
Switching it into "collaborative types" yields 860 hits. "Collaborative personalities" yields 151. Trying to force Google to give me a typology by using simple numbers doesn't help much: "four types of collaborators" yields six links, and "three types of collaborators" yields none at all.
I was reminded, during this search, of this interesting and provocative slideshow on "collaboration superpowers":

...but even that phrase, coined by the cunning Jane McGonigal, has gained little traction: I count only 152 Google hits.
This is disheartening, given the many different ways that Internet has enabled new forms of collaboration. Anyone want to brainstorm with me on producing a document that will fill this need?

"i should have believed stalin"

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:05:29 GMT

This video sums up exactly why I won't be going to see the Watchmen movie... a shame that the person who finally said it was... Hitler? [Contains spoilers.]

For now, at least, I'll have to stick with my fond memories of the 1980s Saturday morning adaptation.

best films of the 1980s

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 20:17:07 GMT

So in my spare time lately (I'm underemployed at the moment) I've been tinkering a lot with my Film Viewing database.
Basically what this means is "doing data entry"—entering and rating more and more films. It's fairly tedious work but somehow it's also engaging and engrossing. And the database as a whole is starting to get "robust"—it's starting to reach that sweet spot where I can command it to produce certain types of output, and get results that I feel are reasonably accurate. For instance, just as a test, I asked it to show me all the movies from the 1980s that I've given a rating of 8 or higher to (out of ten). I'm pretty pleased with the results, a list of 30 films which I think I could defend as the "best films of the 1980s."
Anyone want to have a good-natured argument about it? Anything I've left out? Anything I've wildly over-rated?
I chose the 80s more-or-less at random, and will happily present the results of a different decade upon request.

film club: a man escaped

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:09:54 GMT

For the last few weeks, Film Club has been interested in movies that present strategies—some successful, some not—for weathering the forces of cultural oppression.
At a certain point, when a film has amassed a sufficiently complicated set of interrelated strategies, I think we can officially say that it is actually depicting a scheme. We have good reason to perk up here: the development of a scheme is a great narrative device, and, in the hands of a competent filmmaker, a deeply satisfying one. Think of films like Rififi, Man on Wire, and Oceans 11: very different films, but each one is built around a scheme, and as their schemes unfold they each yield similiar pleasures.
To this list we could add this week's pick, Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped (1959). The plot is simplicity itself. A police liutenant in occupied France is imprisoned by Germans. He intends to escape. That's pretty much it. He is planning this escape literally every second we see him on screen, starting when he's being driven to the prison. Before we even see his face we see him trying to figure out if he can get out of the car and make a run for it:

It's not the most successful attempt:

So, OK. He chalks this up to "if at first you don't succeed" and carries on. The next attempt, made from within the belly of the prison, is going to have to be more complicated than a simple jump-and-run. But that's OK: the more complicated the scheme is, the more enjoyable it is to see enacted.
This hinges, of course, on a filmmaker who is willing to visually represent the details as they unfold. To his enormous credit, Bresson lavishes loving attention on these details. There are passages in this film that are practically like an Instructables video on How To Break Out of Jail:

Part of the reason that Bresson can spend so much narrative time on examining these details is that he rigorously strips out any element of the narrative that doesn't have to do directly with the protagonist and the plan. It's not hard to imagine a less assured filmmaker building in a villainous German character, as a way of establishing their threat level: Bresson just takes it as a given and moves on. A less assured filmmaker would likely show us the other prisoners being executed: Bresson just relies on word-of-mouth, and the occasional sound of machine-gun fire.
This may sound like its short on visceral thrill, and, it's true that we're not dealing with Oz here. But Bresson has a different goal in mind: he wants to put us in the head of our protagonist, to impress upon us the "thrill" of the smallest details. Bresson is right that, to a prisoner, something subtle like approaching footfalls or the quickest glimpse of a weapon can hold enormous menace:

...and he is right that, to a prisoner, the smallest utilitarian object can convey enormous advantages:

...can be, in fact, a source of hope and courage:

This goes all the way down, in Bresson's conception, to finding a splinter of wood that is the correct size for one's purposes:

When we begin to discuss the ways in which the quotidian can be charged with enormous meaning, we begin to move out of the realm of filmmaking, and into the realm of spiritual or mystical belief. (Bresson himself has been quoted as saying "The supernatural is only the real rendered more precise; real things seen close up.") His religious belief has been amply discussed elsewhere, and it's really beyond the scope of this blog post, but I will say that by the point in the film where one character refers to incarceration as a way of moving into a state of "grace," I'm prepared to believe it. (Especially impressive: the film has invested this observation with the weight of truth through craft, rather than through the easy application of sloppy sentimentality.) This film makes a great introduction to Bresson; I hope to watch more of his films in the future.
Next week: Film Club member Tiffanny E. writes "I wanted to explore more the idea of being imprisoned but avoid actual jails ... so I am picking The Diving Bell and the Butterfly." Stay tuned~

geek apotheosis

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:41:00 GMT

Earlier this week:

...and, well, I meant it. Take "Red F," for instance. For the first two minutes it's a pleasing blend of frenzied drum programming, synthesizer noise, and geek anthemics—which already hits my pleasure center pretty hard—then, just before the 2:00 mark, it gives one final push into the transcendent. If this is what my God looks like, then this track is what my angels sound like.

Caution: loud.

film club: the loneliness of the long-distance runner

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:40:20 GMT

Last week, Film Club looked at They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which presents a world so exploitative that the only meaningful gesture of resistance is to refuse existence itself by engaging in violent self-destruction. Choosing death by a bullet certainly holds no shortage of dramatic force, but we here at Film Club wondered whether the movies didn't have some other, better strategy to offer in response to a hostile world.
With that question in mind, we turn to The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1962), which tells the story of Colin, played memorably by Tom Courtenay:

Colin is a working-class adolescent, and has some sense that the world is not really prepared to offer him what we'll call a rewarding life. This understanding, as we see it in Colin, is inchoate—it manifests itself more as ennui than as critique. He's bright enough to have an intuitive sense that the future looks like a dead end, but not bright enough to avoid making bad decisions. As such, he resembles the kids from La Haine (Film Club 4), or (especially) Antoine Doinel from The 400 Blows (1959). Like Antoine, he's likable without really being good.

And also like Antoine, he eventually runs afoul of the law, and ends up in a reformatory. Not the happiest-looking place:

Colin does have one thing that Antoine doesn't have, however: athletic skill. Before long, this has attracted the attention of the school's ambitious headmaster, who sees in Colin an opportunity to gain recognition for the school (a competition against an upper-class prep school looms in the distance). As a result, Colin gets some degree of preferential treatment: while the other students / prisoners are doing routine exercises, Colin is permitted to leave school grounds to practice his long distance running. This image nicely captures the dynamic:

There might well be a component of loneliness to this, but the film doesn't dwell on it. Instead, the film presents these afternoons, when Colin is out in the woods practicing, almost frolicking, as opportunities for exhiliration and joy:

...although, as my Film Club compatriot Tiffanny E. pointed out, this kind of officially-sanctioned liberty constitutes a kind of "freedom without freedom." Does that matter, when the happiness it generates seems genuine?

That question is one that persists up until the end of the film, coming fully into its own during the final intramural race, in which Colin faces a single important choice. I won't discuss the outcome, but I will say that it raises a number of additional questions, most of them interesting. Some of them: what constitutes "winning?" If one participant in a competition proves themselves the superior athlete, does it matter whether that athlete is also designated the winner? To whom? When an athlete is a member of a team, who benefits the most from that athlete's victory? When sports represents a form of escape, is it wise for someone to take advantage of that as an opportunity, even when it benefits to those who have entrapped you?
These questions could be loosely categorized as questions that pertain to the philosophy of sport, and to a degree I was interested in pursuing sports films as a possible avenue of future inquiry (we've flirted with this idea once before, when we watched Dazed and Confused (Film Club 21), which also represents organized sports as a morally-complicated form of salvation). But in choosing a pick for next week, I kept coming back to the tension that this film presents between the poles of repression and escape, which led me instead to choose Robert Bresson's prisoner-of-war film A Man Escaped (1956).
And a final note: no aspect of this film has given me much insight into why the former Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, would have compared himself to Colin in the middle of his political meltdown (link contains a spoiler, btw). Colin may be likeable, but he's also stubborn, impulsive, and (arguably) nihilistic—he is also unambiguously guilty of the crime he is jailed for committing.

how to read on a budget

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 21:39:40 GMT

Sad but true: with nearly 5 million Americans drawing unemployment aid, it's becoming increasingly likely that you, dear reader, may have less discretionary income to spend on books than you might have a few years ago.
However, that doesn't mean you should have to go without poetry. Many forward-thinking small presses out there have decided to begin producing downloadable chapbooks, as a way of experimentally engaging with the Web's impressive duplication and distribution capacities. And since the production costs of these chapbooks are essentially passed along to whoever decides to print them out (ideally you and me), many of these small presses have made their downloadable chapbooks available for free.
A good place to start?: try Faux Press' index of nearly fifty free chapbooks. If you follow avant-garde poetry, the list of figures who have work there is pretty impressive: Bruce Andrews, Brenda Iijima, K. Silem Mohammad, Chris Stroffolino... but the one I began with was Christina Strong's Utopian Politics, which presents a kind of frenzied transmission that alternately evokes travel, digital communication, and post-millenial state control / resistance.
[Cross-posted to the Vivarium blog.]

what news looks like

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:53:04 GMT

Flickr user blprnt_van has been using Processing and the New York Times Article Search API to track the occurence of "organizations and personalities" over the course of the year. "Connections between these people & organizations are [then visualized as] lines," and the mind-blowing results are below:

Click on the image for a giant-sized, legible version.
Information visualization edges ever closer to graphically representing something that matches my most deeply-held conception of what God looks like.
Found via the Daily Clique, and indirectly through BLDGBLOG's delicious links.

film club: bonnie and clyde

Sun, 08 Feb 2009 01:43:58 GMT

When Film Club wrapped up last week's pick, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), I said that it picqued my interest in two different things: 1) how a filmmaker might control the level of sympathy an audience might feel towards a criminal couple, and 2) how a filmmaker might approach the long-term success or failure of a romantic relationship born in the heat of an impulsive moment. Bonnie and Clyde (1967), this week's pick, addresses both of those questions in ways that are worth examining.
First the question of sympathy. There's something powerful about the psychology of movies—perhaps inherent to the psychology of storytelling itself—which enables us to give over our sympathy to nearly any character placed at the front and center of a narrative, even characters who might otherwise strike us as repellent. (I've written on this before, when discussing Psycho (Film Club 39) and Peeping Tom (Film Club 38).)
The addition of "star charisma" pretty much doubles whatever bonus we get from this "protagonist factor": we're prone to root for Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange in Postman not only because the narrative centers around them but also because, well, they're incredibly good-looking people.
Does Bonnie and Clyde play this card? Absolutely. If anything, Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty are even more charismatic than Lange and Nicholson:

But, star charisma or no star charisma, the protagonist factor will only get you so far if the characters' motivations aren't clear, and if they aren't ones that we feel at least loosely sympathetic towards. This is where Postman drops the ball: as I wrote last week, we end up not being sure why Nicholson and Lange decide to flee to Chicago, not being sure why they give up on that plan, not being sure why they have to resort to murder, not being sure why they can't settle down after the murder has been enacted. Each time we encounter one of these moments of confusion, our ability to identify with them drains away a little bit more.
Bonnie and Clyde doesn't make the same mistake. Clyde argues explicity for why Bonnie should join him in a life of crime, presenting it as a clear alternative to (and improvement upon) the service-industry life that Bonnie's headed towards. The two of them later use an identical argument to enlist gas station attendant C. W. Moss as a sidekick:

Neither Bonnie nor C. W. need all that much convincing, and neither does the audience: we've all imagined, at some point or another, that being a bank robber would be more exciting, glamorous, and sexy than whatever it is we do for a day job. The argument also involves an explicit contempt towards the concept of living a "normal" life, a contempt which I think holds ground in the mind of the contemporary film-goer—certainly it must have resonated with audiences in 1967. (Whether it would have been a motivating factor for a young girl in the early 1930s is anybody's guess.)
Once the crime spree is underway, it doesn't take long for the authorities to begin pursuit. This kind of relentless external pressure makes for very strong motivation: they spend the entire remainder of the film trying not to get imprisoned or shot, and we're right along with them, every step of the way.

Interestingly, as this pursuit ramps up, and as the escapes grow more and more harrowing, the normal, domestic life (which we rejected so soundly in the first third of the film) begins to seem more and more appealing, at least to Bonnie, and, to a degree, to the audience. This is where we begin to part ways with Clyde: during one memorable moment where we see (and where Bonnie sees) that he is unable to imagine a life other than the one he has chosen. (There's a definite purity to his world-view, but such lack of doubt can't, it seems, be sustained by non-mythic mortals like ourselves.)
This leads up to the inevitable conclusion—I won't discuss it here in great detail, beyond saying that, like Postman's director Bob Rafelson, this film's director, Arthur Penn, seems to be saying that the criminal impulse and its associated libidinal energies are nonviable foundations for a stable, long-lasting relationship. From a narrative perspective, this works: the forces that eventually doom the relationship are pretty much the natural end result of the choices they've made. This contrasts especially well against Postman's resolution, which muddies the point by descending into mere capriciousness.
This makes Bonnie and Clyde the more satisfying tragedy, but there's a way in which I wonder if there isn't a faint conservative attitude behind this conclusion: isn't the ultimate moral here, then, that Bonnie would have been better off locked into Depression-era service work? Debatable.
This film got us thinking about exactly which life strategies are the appropriate ones for surviving economic hard times, a line of inquiry that brought us directly to our next pick: 1969's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?. This one marks the first choice of our new third member, Tiffanny E. Welcome aboard, T., looking forward to seeing where this goes.

the dreaded "25 things" virus

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:58:41 GMT

Those of you who have logged into Facebook in the last few weeks have very likely witnessed the wildfire spread of the "25 Random Things" meme / virus. I wasn't going to do it, and then last night I abruptly caved in and did it. I was fairly happy with the results so I thought I'd post them here as well.

1) In general, I like people and I like the world.
2) I enjoy making lists, and I spend more time than I probably should tracking data about my own life. For instance, I maintain a database of all the films I've ever seen (you can see the last 20 here)
3) I like having conversations, but I don't really like talking on the telephone.
4) I do, however, like text messaging, and I send several hundred text messages a month.
5) I like "experimental" music, film, writing, comics, and games, but really that just comes from liking music, film, writing, comics, and games so much that I want to experience them in the full variety of their forms. Put another way: I try not to be a snob.
6) I like collecting music, thinking about my music, and organizing and arranging my music. For a period I was buying at least one new CD a week. I've slowed down a bit lately, in part because I'm now involved in trading a lot of music with friends.
7) I am cripplingly dependent on iTunes, especially because of its rating feature, and the way it tracks Play Count and Date Last Played. My music listening is increasingly dictated by the interplay of these particular data-sets.
8) I like to dance, and I like almost anything that qualifies as dance music, from Beyonce to Mouse on Mars.
9) In the mid-1990s, I taught myself how to rap, and I still have a few fairly lengthy raps committed to memory. I intended it to be tongue-in-cheek, but I have actually come to believe that it is one of my more impressive talents.
10) I've been in two bands, and performed music live on stage somewhere around 30 times, although I have no musical training and generally consider myself to have no actual musical talent.
11) I use humor as a sort of social lubricant, and don't believe I could really be friends with someone who didn't think I was funny.
12) I would rather be thought of as attractive than be thought of as smart, although I put WAY more energy into being smart than I do into being attractive.
13) I enjoy flirting, sexual tension, and sexual confusion. If I'm not experiencing two out of three in any given week I will begin to make ill-advised decisions.
14) I think of sex as only one form of a larger category of intimacy, and I think that people who think sex is a particularly unique or special form of intimacy are engaged in a conceptual error. I am not immune to making this error myself, at times, although I try to catch myself.
15) I detest money, and I detest the things people must do to get money. The fact that I care as much as I do about money is one of the things I dislike about myself.
16) I do, however, enjoy teaching, and I believe that I am good at it.
17) I am fascinated by violence, and representations of violence. I don't ENJOY movies that depict torture and violence but I am unquenchably curious about them and will eventually end up seeing them all. (They're always worse in my imagination, just FYI.)
18) From roughly age 12 to age 18, I participated in a program called "Cinekyd," which taught young people the basics of film and television production. I spent most of my Cinekyd time in the "Graphics and Minatures" department, learning about special effects. This is undoubtedly part of where my love of science fiction and horror films comes from.
19) My immediate family has an endearing interest in grotesque stories about things like bodily functions. Hearing a story of this sort around the dinner table is one of the ways that I can tell that I am "home."
20) I don't believe in the afterlife, but I do believe that places can be haunted. I make no real effort to reconcile this apparent discontinuity.
21) I don't really believe in magic, but in the spirit of experiential knowledge I performed a few "spells" just to see what would happen. The results were... interesting?
22) I have many fond memories of playing Dungeons and Dragons, and I still have my polyhedral dice nearby should someone drop by and want to fire up a game.
23) I spent many hours as a young child playing the Atari 2600, and will still occasionally load up a Web-based replica of the old 2600 game "Adventure," a game in which your "character" is simply an unadorned rectangle.
24) I am one of those people who has Opinions About Fonts.
25) I am seldom bored, and am usually at my happiest when engaged in mutiple projects. An old friend once told me he wished that I could have 36 hours in every day, and I still count that as one of the nicest things anyone ever said about me.

If this is the kind of thing you enjoy doing, you should consider yourself "tagged."

film club: the postman always rings twice

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 17:10:53 GMT

The Postman Always Rings Twice is a novel that's been made into a movie not once, not twice, but four times. Clearly there's something in the story that continues to captivate the minds of audiences... or, at the very least, the minds of filmmakers. The makers of the 1981 version (which we watched this week for Film Club), however, seem unable to effectively locate whatever that compelling element might be—they end up chasing down a few different narrative paths, diluting their energy and losing momentum at every turn.
The setup is certainly fecund enough: we open with shiftless drifter Frank Chambers, played here by Jack Nicholson.

Chambers agrees to work at a service station that's owned by local entrepreneur / ethnic stereotype Nick Papadokis.

It's pretty evident from the outset that Frank has taken this job not because he aspires to mechanichood as a career but because he wants to fuck Papadokis' wife, Cora, played here by Jessica Lange.

Now, I'd argue that there's some miscasting here. Both Frank and Cora, we later learn, are impulsive, brutish, and more than a little bit dumb—so when Nicholson plays Frank as impish and Lange plays Cora as icily elegant, it doesn't, for my money, work. (If I were remaking the film today, I'd get Joaquin Phoenix and Rose McGowan—two dim-witted-looking actors who basically ooze erotic energy.) In any case, if we set aside these quibblings, we can see that we're left with a dramatic structure that's basically sound—it's a garden-variety love triangle. From a narrative perspective, it works. If you want to make an erotically-charged thriller—and it seems, at the outset, that this is what director Bob Rafelson and screenwriter David Mamet are out to do—then all you really have to do is lay out the promise of some forbidden fucking among charismatic protagonists and, as long as you delay the payoff for long enough to generate some dramatic tension, the script basically writes itself.
David Mamet is a world-famous, award-winning screenwriter and playwright, so I know that he knows some basic methods for generating dramatic tension. And so I'm surprised to see him throw away a lot of opportunity by having them fuck within the first twenty minutes of the film:

Hrm. OK—the film, at this early point in its development, has made only one promise to the audience, which is that we'll get to see Lange and Nicholson transgress on camera. When the filmmakers deploy this plot point so early, without a suitable period of tease and buildup, it feels, frankly, like the narrative equivalent of sex without foreplay.
Granted, the buildup is only one half of the narrative arc of the romantic triangle—there's also all the drama inherent in dealing with the aftermath. Again a number of ready-made dramatic situations present themselves: one expects to see scenes wherein Papadokis grows suspicious, perhaps a scene where we get some sense of the risk involved in his reaction, eventually a big reveal... they're cliches, admittedly, but they're cliches because, frankly, they work. Maybe Mamet thinks they're too cheap. He must think something, because he eschews every one of these scenes, in favor of focusing on Frank and Cora's attempt to run away to Chicago.

This plan is unclearly motivated—we're not sure, at this juncture, exactly what kind of future either Cora and Frank envision—and their decision to break the plan off and return to life at the motel is equally unclear. It's not long after that that they begin to plan to kill Nick, although in the absence of the scenes I talk about above—the ones that establish that Nick might be suspicious, and the ones that establish his suspicion as a threat—the decision to kill him seems effectively arbitrary. I'm willing to be sympathetic to characters who give in to selfish lust (if they're charismatic enough) and I'll even be sympathetic to them being forced to murder someone if there's a self-preservation angle—but take that angle away and they simply seem like utterly amoral figures, driven to kill out of simple nihilism. (Which is not to say that you can't make a film exploring that idea—take Badlands as perhaps the most successful example—but this film ain't Badlands.)
So, anyway, yes, the film does away with all the setup and has Cora and Frank kill Nick, shortly before the halfway point in the film. Not long afterwards, they're tried and eventually acquitted. The film has thrown away enough narrative elements that it's managed to compress a pretty basic three-act story into 1:20 of run-time, leaving it with roughly another forty minutes to... do what, exactly?
It's easy to view that final forty with something like hope, to believe that Mamet and Rafelson have telescoped the meat-and-potatoes of the murder plot because they something up their sleeve for the second half of the film. Whatever it has in mind, however, doesn't quite come off: the film never regains narrative momentum, and we're left with a series of odd little left-turns like Frank running off with the circus for a week and having a romance with Angelica Huston, who plays a sexy lion-tamer. No, seriously:

It's a curious choice, and it's not the only curveball that the film throws us in its final third. It seems almost like the film does these things in order to not have to do something else. If we ask ourselves this question—what isn't the film doing?—it becomes evident that it almost never shows us are scenes of Cora and Frank happy in their post-Nick home, and in fact spends much of its narrative energy contriving reasons for one or the other of them to be away. This could be read as a failure of nerve: it's not too hard to imagine a squeamish filmmaker balking at the opportunity to show a pair of unrepentant killers happy and in love. One could also, of course, read it as a sort of moralizing critique: an indicator that neither Frank nor Cora have thought through a vision for a sustainable future together.
There is, ultimately, something interesting about that read, which imagines that Rafelson and Mamet are attempting to set up a tension between the directed, criminal-minded lust of Frank and Cora's "courtship" and the ambient malaise of their post-trial "relationship." This read is aided, a smidge, by Rafelson's use of longtime Bergman collaborator Sven Nyquist as the film's director of photography: true to form, Nyquist shoots the film less as a noir and more as, well, a Bergman-esque European relationship drama:

This read generates a certain degree of promise, but the film never figures out exactly what it wants to do with this tension (if in fact it is intending to present it at all), and it never confidently establishes a coherent stance towards Frank and Cora—even at the film's conclusion, it's still unclear whether we're meant to feel sympathy for them or hold them in judgment. It reaches the end of its run-time and allows a more-or-less chance event to simply wipe the questions off the table.

So, in conclusion: a curious and frustrating film, but one that made me think about two things: 1) how an audience responds to a charismatic criminal couple— either by judging them, or by developing sympathy for them, and 2) how filmmakers approach the long-term success or failure of romantic relationships born in the heat of an impulsive moment. I do believe there are good films that deal with this exact pair of questions—Badlands (1973) is one, and my pick for next week, Bonnie and Clyde (1967) may be another. Stay tuned!

film club: the big sleep

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:06:26 GMT

So last week, after a brief holiday hiatus, Skunkcabbage and I returned to the business of Film Club. The last film we looked at, The Maltese Falcon, featured Humphrey Bogart playing private detective Sam Spade, and we decided to carry on in that vein this week, taking a look at Bogart playing private detective Philip Marlowe in Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep.
I often think of a movie's plot as consisting of all the narrative "questions" that are unanswered at any given moment. In order for a film to be plot-driven, it needs to have at least a few questions "open" (unanswered) at each moment of its run-time; that's what keeps viewers curious and invested in seeing how the story turns out. Watching The Big Sleep, however, is like seeing this principle in total overdrive. The film dumps so many questions in your lap, and has so many of these questions "open" at any given moment, that to even try to hold them all in your head is nearly impossible without a notepad.
The film opens with Marlowe being called to the home of one General Sternwood, who wants him to investigate a scheme in which someone is blackmailing one of his daughters, Carmen. This leads to some obvious questions: Who is blackmailing Carmen? Why? What do they have on her? Before Marlowe leaves, the film throws a few more in our direction: What's the deal with Sean Regan, Sternwood's companion, who has mysteriously vanished? Why does Vivian, Sternwood's other daughter, seem to take such an interest in trying to figure out why Marlowe's been hired?
Once the investigation begins, the questions really begin piling up. Who killed this guy?

Or this guy?

What's gangster Eddie Mars' relationship to all of this? What about Joe Brody, another blackmailer? What about Mars' wife, who appears to also be missing? By midway through the film has so many "open" questions that its plot begins to resemble a kind of porous texture, shaped almost entirely by the narrative gaps that its puzzles define.

Most of these questions, although not all of them, do eventually end up answered, although the answers aren't particularly satisfying or memorable. (I watched the film twice this month, and even with it fresh in my memory I'd still struggle to answer all of the questions I listed above.) But the film is still totally enjoyable and entertaining, and this led me to realize that The Big Sleep is not actually plot-driven, but rather character-driven. The real pleasure is not in navigating and decoding the puzzle-structure but rather in watching Philip Marlowe, as embodied by Bogart.

When writing on The Maltese Falcon, I wrote that male viewers watching the film are likely to have the experience of wanting to be Sam Spade. That experience is redoubled here: watching The Big Sleep is like browsing through a primer on how to perform the codes of masculinity. (In this way, they can be seen as forerunners of the Bond films, which serve something of the same cultural purpose.) The Big Sleep teaches men how to dress, drink, and smoke, how to remain cool under pressure, how to be funny, and how to gather and synthesize information. It teaches men how to throw a punch:

...as well as how to take one:

Above all, it teaches men how to flirt. Director Hawks stacks the deck a bit in this regard, placing Bogart / Marlowe in a universe pretty much universally inhabited by charismatic (and receptive) women. To close, then, here's a brief gallery of some of the women Bogart encounters, opening with the most notable of the batch, the stunning Lauren Bacall:

And now the rest:

Whew. OK, so, next?
Next we're sticking with noir, but we're leaving the 1930s and 40s (where we've been parked since, wow, October!). We'll be checking out the 1981 version The Postman Always Rings Twice, featuring David Mamet's adaptation of the James M. Cain novel.
Want more on Big Sleep director Howard Hawks? Film blog Only the Cinema is currently doing an "Early Hawks Blog-A-Thon," devoted to writing on Hawks films that predate Bringing Up Baby (1938). Check it out!

philadelphian walls

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 22:04:35 GMT

empire in decline

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:18:31 GMT

So last night I was out to dinner with the spellbinding Martha K. We got to talking about politics and soon found the opportunity to return to a rant I occasionally indulge in, in which I posit that the concept of a "Middle Class" is reasonably new, historically speaking, and may one day (in the grim meathook future) be regarded as a historical blip.
This is a rant in which I overstate a bit basically to be sensationalist (you could argue that the Middle Class has existed for a good five centuries), but I do count myself among the folks who believe that a certain "golden age" for the US middle class has, ultimately, passed.
This argument is elaborated upon in Andrew J. Bacevich's The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, a book my dad loaned me when I was visiting him for Christmas. (Scavengings here.) Bacevich includes the following passage, to illustrate what America looked like at its peak:
"By the end of World War II, the country possessed more than two-thirds of the world's gold reserves and more than half its entire manufacturing capacity. In 1947, the United States by itself accounted for one-third of world exports. ... As measured by value, its exports more than doubled its imports. The dollar had displaced the British pound sterling as the global reserve currency, with the Bretton Woods system, the international money regime created in 1944, making the United States the world's money manager. ... Among the world's producers of steel, airplanes, automobiles, and electronics, it ranked first in each category." (pp. 24-5)

So... what happened? Bacevich spends a good chunk of the first third of the book walking us through passages like this:
"We can fix the tipping point with precision. It occurred between 1965, when President Lyndon Baines Johnson ordered US combat troops to South Vietnam, and 1973, when President Richard M. Nixon finally ended direct US involvement in that war. ... The costs of the Vietnam War ... destablized the economy, as evidenced by deficits, inflation, and a weakening dollar. In August 1971, Nixon tacitly acknowledged the disarray into which the economy had fallen by devaluing the dollar and suspending its controvertibility into gold ... In 1972, domestic oil production peaked and then began its inexorable, irreversible decline. ... Simultaneously, a shift in the overall terms of trade occurred. In 1971, after decades in the black, the United States had a negative trade balance. In 1973, and again in 1975, exports exceeded imports in value. From then on, it was all red ink; never again would American exports equal imports." (29)

Sigh. I'm OK with the end of US exceptionalism; I just hope that it means we become a country like, say, Belgium, and not a country like, say, Somalia.
Related: "Rusty superpower in need of careful driver," a Times UK article in which Matthew Parris argues that Obama "will be the first US President to manage an empire in decline"
Related: "Obama Warns of Prospect for Trillion-Dollar Deficits," from today's New York Times