Seven Red

It’s often been said of The Wire that each season addresses and interrogates a different institution, and the relationships that institution produces. So, when we watch The Wire, we get analyses of the police, of journalism, of education, of unions, etc. What should be noted is that these analyses are what the social theorists call “synchronic,” which is to say, they are snapshots of a a specific time rather than an analysis of development, or becoming (that is, “diachronic” analysis). In Breaking Bad, a show that, to my mind, can hold its own next to The Wire, what we find is a diachronic analysis, and maybe even a homily. The point is already implicit in the title. “Breaking Bad,” is all about becoming, of turning from one thing into another. I won’t replay the plot here, other than to say that the premise of the show has  high school chemistry teacher (though we learn that his job is a step down from his PhD in chemistry) Walter White, who, upon learning that he has been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, begins cooking methamphetamine with one of his former students, a junky and apparent lowlife named Jesse Pinkman, in order to accumulate some capital for his family, given his imminent demise. During the first season, Pinkman wonders why a square like White would “break bad” at this particular moment. The New York Times has, of course, picked up on this, wondering not only at the slim popularity of the show – set in  New Mexico – on the culturally dominant coasts, but also at the transformation of Walter White, the lead character (I would argue Pinkman is a co-lead, though Brian Cranston has picked up more Emmy’s). How can you have a lead character of a show that changes so much?

What I’d like to suggest here is that the diachronic nature of the show is also concerned with larger historical transitions. Breaking Bad  is a television show that concerns itself with modes of production. Alright, I’ll first admit it. This may be a case of simply finding the stuff that you’re interested in. I’ve been rather immersed of late in the massive literature on the transition debates in Marxist historiography. I’m talking Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism, the transition debates that emerged in Science & Society between Dobbs and Paul Sweezy in the 1950′s, the resurgence of those debates in the 1970′s and 1980′s, the twists thrown in by Wallerstein’s world system theory, and its modifications by Gunder Frank and the like. Yes, I’m all about transition, mode of production, and craft right now. That said, I think a case can be made that the shifts in modes of production are a central element in Breaking Bad‘s plotting. If The Wire  arranged its seasons according to its concern with institutions in a synchronic way, Breaking Bad arranges its seasons according to its concern with the development of modes of production over time. 

Season 1: Craft Production – Season 1 explores the craft mode of production, where the expert craftsman possessing esoteric knowledge makes the product in an ad hoc but knowledgeable manner. The labor relations of the craft mode of production are also on display, as Jesse essentially enters into an apprenticeship in crystal meth production. If Season 1 explores anything, it is the Master-Apprentice relationship (the chemic al bromance, as it were) between Walter and Jesse. We see this develop throughout their relationship, but particularly in Jesse’s struggle with his subordinate role in the production process, coupled with his increasing awareness that the quality of the product is both important (he discards a batch of otherwise passable meth) and grounded in an esoteric knowledge that he does not possess. The following compilation, in addition to using one of the better soundtrack songs from Season 1, also really demonstrates the show’s visual obsession with the production process:

Season 2: Small-scale Industry – In Season 2, Walter and Jesse’s craft operation is transformed to a small scale industry, as they produce the crystal at much higher levels of output, beginning to standardize their process. That they are transitioning from a craft mode of production to an industrial mode is especially clear through the relationship with Gustavo Fring, the merchant-distributor, who demands ever larger quantities of their product. Walter and Jesse ramp up production in a standardized way – no longer bickering about roles within the production space, and assisted in their productive procedures by investment in constant capital (i.e., when Walt sends Jesse out for the new equipment to run the crystal production efficiently). We also see the transition moment where the craft producer becomes so invested in distribution (which is to say, the circulation of commodities) that he starts to control that space, as with the guild-based restrictions on first-priority sales in the medieval town. This development is nowhere more clear than in what has become, perhaps, the classic scene of the series: Walter White recognizing the emerging craft production of a possible competitor, and addressing it with prohibitions to trade, the “Stay out of my Territory” moment that, as an added bonus, plays against my favorite TV on the Radio song:

Season 3: Large-scale industry – Walter and Jesse have been completely integrated into the factory/monopoly capital mode of production. Through their relationship with the merchant-distributor Gustavo Fring , they’ve been turned into employees of his large-scale distribution operation. They now produce meth not in their RV, but in a shimmering, automated, and scientifically advanced factory system. The labor relationships represented here are straight out of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital. Fring’s goal is to identify and extract a standardized production process to such an extent that any individual producer (that is, Walter and Jesse) becomes expendable. The entire plot of Season 3 turns on this expropriation of craft knowledge from the direct producer to an abstracted form that can be filled by anyone. This is the role of Gale Boetticher, the lab assistant brought in by Fring to replace and displace the Master-Apprentice relationship between Walter and Jesse with an abstract labor relationship. Walter recognizes this function for Gale early on, succumbs to it eventually as Jesse spins out of control, but ultimately uses Fring’s desired proletarianization to his advantage in the gripping season finale.  In Season 3, we enter the era of monopoly capitalism.

So, Season 4? We already have hints of where the new season will go. Skyler – Walter’s wife – is a “bookkeeper,” essentially an accountant (although bookkeeping, as the “craft” form of accountancy, is probably significant, and may be laying the groundwork for more formalized relationships in Season 5). She has come around to the idea that Walter’s meth production is a going concern, and she has signaled that she wants to take on the task of figuring out how to launder the money effectively, a job previously done in an ad hoc manner by the hilarious corrupt lawyer Saul Goodman (who is really, we learn, Irish). If I were to predict the trajectory, I’d say that Season 4 will be devoted in some measure to the emergence of finance capital, which is to say, to the shift from direct production to abstract circulation of capital. The real question will be whether Vince Gilligan can pull off this new season in a non-nostalgic way. Will Walt simply hold on to his esoteric knowledge, despite its expropriation, or will a new vision of craft emerge that’s more than simple nostalgia for the old craft ethos. This new vision of craft emerging within the dominance of finance capital is, I think, the engine runs many of the questions of culture and production today, from the emergence of various craft food and drink movements to the teevee representations of labor as craft production contests paired with a healthy dose of entrepreneurship. So, I think this is an important question for all of us (it’s also why I think Breaking Bad is exploring questions that perhaps even exceed the policy concerns explored in The Wire). As is almost painfully clear throughout, Walter’s cancer is a metaphor – but it may operate metaphorically in a number of ways. Accumulation, for instance. More on this as we watch Season 4 together.

So, this post kicks off two new themes for the summer: Craft Summer and Breaking Bad Summer. I want to look more closely at the question of craft production, specifically as it reemerges as a kind of cultural ideal within the overall dynamics of finance capital. But I also just love Breaking bad, as you can probably tell. So I want to write about Breaking Bad. These two things should keep us populated through the summer.

Several years ago, George Clooney made a very boring movie called Good Night and Good Luck. I’m not particularly interested in rehashing the movie, much less praising it, as I think it was nostalgic and reactionary in many ways. But I do want to comment on its boring quality, which I think was the best thing about it, and tie that to some current events: specifically, Obama’s recent visit to the House Republican Retreat.

So, Good Night and Good Luck was interesting precisely because it was so boring. At times, the film slows down so much that you don’t think it will ever move again: slow, measured dialogue, long pauses between lines, a plot that develops through a series of interruptions. We saw it in the theater in Giant State University Town, and there were literally people around us sleeping halfway through the film. Now, you would think that the major conflict at the heart of the film – Edward R. Murrow’s showdown with Joe McCarthy – would be sufficient to sustain some interest. I don’t know if it is that interesting or not, but I do think Clooney’s handling of the filmic elements push the film beyond this conflict in interesting ways.

Good Night and Good Luck presents itself as a critique of modern journalistic practice, and, specifically, sensationalism in journalism. The nostalgic (and reactionary) point is that journalism had some glorious heyday (represented here by Edward R. Murrow) during which careful assessment of social and political conditions was its stock in trade; for Clooney, this care has devolved into a chase for the latest adrenaline pumping report or nasty political fight. I don’t want to disagree with part of the premise. It’s clear that contemporary journalism, and especially of the teevee variety, is a monumental farce. If we were to read it nostalgically, we would see the Murrow moment, together with some fantasy concocted about Woodward and Bernstein and Watergate in general, as the contemporary ideology of professional journalism, an ideology that’s completely metastasized. Ideology in the Althusserian sense of an imagined form of real relations, and gone straight haywire in some supposed quest for the exposé, combined with some laughable contrivance of conflict with power. (I’ll note, briefly, that the lefties constantly claiming to be “Speaking Truth to Power” are merely another pathetic species of this arrangement – the ease with which the Tea Imbeciles grab hold of the mantra is clear enough). The false image of this relation of power is perhaps best exemplified in the painful stupidity of a Tim Russert (if we may speak negatively of the dead) – the ultimate insider playing at some working class Buffalo persona while pretending to throw “hard questions” at politicians. (This little bit of Sunday morning nonsense has become even more false and, incredibly,  even more stupid in the person of David Gregory, though at least Gregory forgoes the asinine and transparent costume of the white male “blue collar guy” and presents himself perfectly openly for what he is: an utterly cynical bourgeois apologist.)

But to return to Clooney’s nostalgic point, we should see that it is itself partly false, to the extent that contemporary journalistic practice is not at all a departure from the ideal constructed around Murrow (which is to say, the same ideal Clooney celebrates in the film) but rather an intensification of that ideal. It’s the fight with Tailguinner Joe (or Nixon, or whoever) as fight (and all that implies) held up as the desideratum always and everywhere. Indeed, today’s chief emulator of Murrow (Keith Olbermann) shows us precisely how the version of conflict has spread malignantly throughout the social body. His “special comments” – almost always vitriolic hyperbole that sends certain factions of the left into some weird vocabulary-driven ecstasy – are the pure intensification of the classic Murrow speech, and they are (not surprisingly) the most YouTubed and chattered about segments of the show, the parts that leave the left blogosphere panting for more. As intense experience goes, we are not far from the rather sad and babbling mania of a Glenn Beck. Of course, I wouldn’t suggest any equivalency between the two commentators outside the affective; the problem is that this might be the only equivalency that matters. Needless to say, Olbermann ends his special comments with an indignant version of Murrow’s “Good night and good luck.” The sign off ends up being only the most obvious outward sign that the fight as fight is what circulates as the Murrow ideal; Olbermann in fact grasps the very ideal that Clooney promotes at the thematic level, thereby demonstrating all the more thoroughly how wrong Clooney is.

If Clooney misunderstands this relationship at the semantic and thematic level, however, he understands it perfectly at the filmic level. The film is boring precisely because it seeks to de-intensify the viewing experience, a quality that is evident in everything from its slow shots and dialogue to its use of black and white. If you want serious television journalism, the film makes us feel, you have to get used to that feeling, its slowness, its pace and patience. You have to desire this level of boredom, at least visually (it’s still rather easy for the long, researched New York Times story to bore the hell out of anyone, but teevee?). Or rather, you have to develop different attention mechanisms, which is not exactly easy when the particular forms of attention played on by sensationalism are exactly what we need to develop under conditions of information overload (oddly, Al Gore gets this right in The Assault on Reason, though he immediately assigns the whole problem to the sphere of biology). The strange tension in the film thus develops between the ramped up semantic content, presumably centered around just the kind of intense adversarial relations that drive sensationalism today, and the extreme slowness of the filmic elements. For my money, though, the film’s slowness is so rhetorically foreign to our now everyday experience of the visual that it ends up lingering. What we learn, in spite of ourselves, is that we fucking hate the film for it, and would never watch it again. Which is, of course, the clearest exposition of the real problem plaguing contemporary journalism, Murrow’s sign-off notwithstanding.

To return this discussion to the present day, and Obama’s recent successes in several (sensationally) aggressive appearances, then, I’d suggest that a similar sort of tension marks the two Obama’s we’ve grown familiar with, if the pundits are to be believed. Call them the Campaign Obama and the Presiding Obama. If you’ve been paying attention to any of this the last few months, you’ll know that the Presiding Obama is a Big Disappointment relative to the Campaign Obama, largely because he doesn’t “fight back” or even, really, “fight at all.” Now, I hesitate the get into any of this, since it’s pretty easy to drift into what’s coming to be called “Obama apologist” mode, whereby any action at all by Mr. Obama is justifiable for some reason, or is otherwise part of some grander strategy (whether for good or evil, the story switches depending on teller), and etc. We’ve heard it all before. For my part, I think plenty of what the Presiding Obama is doing policy-wise sucks. I also think it’s just a hard goddamn job. So I’ll deny Obama apologetics here and say I’m just floating an analogy. In any case, ever since the State of the Union, the recent energetic townhalls, and the now-legendary Enter the Dragon act Obama did on the House Republicans’ dumbassery in Baltimore, all you hear from the Democratic and liberal sites is that Obama’s got his groove back, and he’s takin’ it to ‘em, and This Is What We Wanted to See All Along.  (And really, House Republicans, when you walk through the garden, you better watch your step…I mean, Baltimore?). But. If I might map the Campaign Obama and the Presiding Obama onto my rough sketch of Good Night and Good Luck, I’d say that the Presiding Obama – the one who doesn’t fight, but goes about the prosaic and tedious business of governing – may be the more interesting. The 2010 campaign is revving up, with the Massachusetts fiasco serving as the wake-up call, I guess, so we could expect to see Campaign Obama return with all the speechifying and electricity. But the Boring-Ass Obama? That’s the guy I want to have a beer with. If we can bracket policy for just a second – always a fraught operation – what’s remarkable about the Presiding Obama is the attempt to circulate a different style or pace. And maybe what we need politically, what precedes policy, is the right metabolism for that kind of slowness, a desire for that level of boredom.

Apologetics and grand strategies aside, I do seem to remember that that’s sorta what the guy was  telling us all along.

That’s right. Seven Red’s love affair with the films of Joseph Gordon-Levitt continues, but not with the forgettable and cringe inducing adolescent pap (500) Days of Summer, in which Zooey Deschanel plays yet another character that helps a forlorn dude find his proper way in the world. Rather, we like Uncertainty, which strikes me as a kind of response to the decision-mania of all the recent ethical culture industry films I’ve discussed here before.  If those films feature an obsession about the “right decision” as their key narrative engine, Uncertainty does the same, and perhaps even more so, but revs the decision engine up so high that it breaks down, turning the Decision Film back on itself.

Gordon-Levitt plays Bobby Thompson, a Canadian emigre and struggling musician who lives in Brooklyn with his girlfriend Kate, a Broadway dancer, played by Lynn Collins. We learn that they’ve only been dating for something like 10 months, which – together with their professions – makes their dilemma all the more pressing. At the beginning of the film, which takes place on July 4 and 5, they walk to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge and Bobby convinces Kate to just flip a coin on it, and let fate decide. The coin flips, lands, and they run in opposite directions, one to the Manhattan side of the bridge, the other to the Brooklyn side. What follows are two completely different stories, meant to be taking place at the same time, but both involving both characters. Each, in other words, would be a result of the coin flip. If you can get past this major conceit of the plot, you actually get two very engaging stories. (The second conceit you’ll have to get over is the color plotting, so to speak, where the Brooklyn-Queens story is “green” and the Manhattan story is “yellow” – the Manhattan story also features “red” as its secondary motif, completing the traffic light visual metaphor).

In the Brooklyn and Queens story, Bobby and Kate visit Kate’s family for a July 4 barbecue. On their drive over they pick up a stray dog, the owner of which they subsequently seek. But the real story here is the interpersonal relationships – it’s a family character study, really. Kate’s family is Latino, and her mother is a kind of hovering matriarch that increasingly sees her control over Kate and now her younger sister slipping away. She disapproves of Bobby – though she claims to like him – largely because he is a struggling musician with no central prospects for success. Kate’s younger sister also appears to be taking some kind of precarious showbiz route, as she is currently deciding to put off a college scholarship in order to pursue acting, a decision she’s apparently made after a rather mediocre turn as Puck in a high school performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Needless to say, the mother is horrified by this choice, and wants Kate to talk her out of it (presumably using her own difficult life as a negative example). The other key character in the Brooklyn-Queens story is Kate’s Uncle Diego (“Tio Dio”), a former boxer who is completely mentally disabled by his fighting days, and presents a condition similar to Alzheimer’s. The point of extreme tension comes when he blurts out “Where’s Hector?” in the middle of the meal.

In the Manhattan story, you get a thriller. Bobby and Kate are going for dim sum and maybe an apartment party for July 4. They end up in a cab, where they find a cell phone (really a Trio). Bobby tries to call around to the owner’s friends, skeptical that the cab driver will seek to return it. But this is no ordinary phone left in a cab. Rather, it holds crucial information to some very bad dudes, all of whom are tracking it down through the streets of Manhattan. We first realize the problem when the first person trying to claim the phone is gunned down right in front of Bobby and Kate on the streets of Chinatown. They are subsequently chased throughout the city, until they come up with their own plan to turn the tables on their pursuers – vaguely the Russian mafia involved in crooked dealings with a disgraced public official.

If we put aside the modernist symbolism of the “found object” (the Trio, the dog) serving as some kind of metaphorical result of the decision, we get an interesting turn. Do the two stories that follow the coin flip leave us with an alternate reality film in the style of a Run, Lola, Run, or, less impressively, a Sliding Doors? No, not really. Because the options don’t derive from the decision that Bobby and Kate have to make. In fact, neither story bears any resemblance to the decision they have to make. It isn’t a question of a decision leading to one or the other of these stories. In Run, Lola, Run, you get a series of possibilities – possible lines of action based on the decision. In films like Sliding Doors, you get a similar series, where reality could go one way or another way based on minute decisions and chance circumstances. While the coin flip opening of Uncertainty would seem to point to a similar structure, the film doesn’t work in either of those ways. Neither of the two stories  is an actualization of a decision, a consequence of the coin flip, or even a possible sequence of events; they are, instead, as the philosophers might say, real but not actual rather than possible but not real. They’re virtual series.  It’s even as if the decision on genre itself at the level of the work was suspended by the filmmakers – a family drama or an adventure film? Which? Let’s hold on to both! Showing Uncertainty next to Run, Lola, Run would in fact be a fantastic way of teaching the difference between the possible and the virtual that runs much of poststructuralist thought (say, the Deleuze of Bergsonism through Difference and Repetition). Perhaps that’s a heavy-handed way to view the film, but I think the readings are there.  In any case, this turn to the virtual character of the stories ends up being even more affirmative than the films that ask us to contemplate the ethical quality of some decision. What you’re left with at the end of Uncertainty is not a past decision to be evaluated, but the future, suspended there. As the film closes – one version of Bobby and Kate on the Brooklyn Bridge, one on the Manhattan Bridge, Kate notes that whatever decision they make, it will be good. Bobby asks Kate, “But will it be the right decision?” Kate pauses, then nods: “Yeah.” This is a more thoroughgoing and radical push on contemporary ethics than all the Gone, Baby, Gone‘s you can conjure up.

We just moved to a new place, and I more or less moved half our stuff myself in order to reduce the moving costs. But that’s not cost free, either physically or in terms of opportunity costs. In any case, one of the costs has been the continued neglect of this here blog. I’ve found it’s hard to blog when you’re carrying boxes of books down three flights of stairs. Harder when you’ve done that all day. Now that we’re set up, I wanted to add this random post to convince myself that I am still adding posts, and that I haven’t given up on this blog in the same way I’ve given up on the Mets’ season (you’ll notice the really severe slide started as soon as I put up a Mets blog post, by the way). Meh.

So,

A. The Wisdom of she – Only people who understand percentage get rich. Very few people understand – really understand – percentage.

B. Soundtrack for the Moon Landing, 40 Years Later – NPR was having a moongasm today. I think one of the big breaks between my generation and my parents’ generation is general feeling about the moon landing. Put plainly, we really don’t care all that much. But hearing the ecstatic recitations on NPR today, I was struck by how much some previous generation does care, and does still get worked up about the whole thing. The moon! I mean, can you imagine? So, a top five songs for the moon-landing-iversary? Suggest other, dear Reader:

5. David Bowie, A Space Oddity (obviously, but for something new, try Natalie Merchant’s cover on the Live at the Neil Simon Theater album)

4. Peter Schilling, Major Tom

3. R.E.M., Man on the Moon (double obviously)

2. Modest Mouse, 3rd Planet (from “The Moon and Antarctica” album – and you could take the whole album, for that matter)

1. Billy Bragg, The Space Race is Over

The #1 jam is the transitional moment – the confused space between those who care and those who don’t care:

My son and I sat beneath the great night sky
Gaze up in wonder
I tell him the tale of Apollo
He says, “Why did they ever go?”
It may look like some empty gesture
To go all that way just to come back
But don’t offer me a place out in cyberspace
Cuz where in the hell’s that at?
Now that the space race is over
It’s been and it’s gone
I’ll never get out of my room
Now that the space race is over
I can’t help but feel that we’re all just going nowhere

The Billy Bragg song really captures it for me, and has for awhile. The space race is over. This was the second theme on the radio today: nobody cares. But it’s more than that, I think. It’s the end of the outside signaled of course by Derrida (il n’y pas hors-texte), and worked into a geopolitical register by Hardt and Negri. Empire is the end of the space race, the impossibility of exit, in its traditional, spatial sense, anyway (it’s no mistake that its cover features a shot of the Earth from space). That’s already what the sad contrivance of Billy Bragg’s lament names, though in this very specific way:the problematic of immanence. And the moon landing would serve to date the demise of exit fairly well, and would be in line with other datings of the so-called postmodern (Jameson’s abandonment of the gold standard comes close enough).

But maybe push it back a bit. Just before we moved out, exited, our old place, we saw Revolutionary Road, several months late, as per usual. It’s really of a piece with all the great exit literature of the period, and it all spells a similar desire struggling with the immanence of capitalist society. From The Organization Man to The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit to The Lonely Crowd, these are 50′s narratives of exit, or confronting the problem of exit’s demise. In Revolutionary Road, “Paris” may as well be the moon – it serves the same function as the moon serves for Billy Bragg. Of course, the 1950′s version is now clearly lunacy, but it culminates in the space race in the first place.  But the shift to “don’t care” really shows the new phase of the transition, one in which the anxiety about spatial exit has been eliminated; the moon landing fails to register after the baby boomers because Empire is already consolidated spatially. (A few years ago I heard an interview with Billy Bragg while we were driving in the car; my mother-in-law, a mathematician, was in the back seat. Bragg made a much more forceful case, recalling how shocking it was that mathematics could do that, could make one get to the moon. Three huzzahs from the back seat. His English accent helped too, I expect. I think this is right, and part of what he wants to say). So Billy Bragg’s quite right in a number of way, but chiefly this: where in the hell’s that at? The old labor philosophy – trained in the spatial logic of the line and the factory gate – can only ask this question. And gaze up in wonder.

But this is really the anthem for a labor movement that’s utterly finished.

How I know I’m getting old:

1. I see that Bravo has a show called NYC Prep, which follows the travails of Manhattan prep school students, a la the Real Housewives franchise. I may be confused about the way these shows gain an audience, but it seems like their only purpose is to stir up class resentment. (The utterly despicable and tedious Miami Social would be the ultimate in nauseating behavior).  That would be, of course, fine by me, but the right seems to understand far better than the “liberals” how to leverage that resentment politically, so it’s more or less a wash.  So she has NYC Prep on for ten minutes or so, during which time I grow increasingly disgusted, until I realize that I’ve hated these fuckers for twenty years. Since before they were even born.
2. Digable Planets “Rebirth of Slick” is now apparently being used to peddle Tide laundry detergent. We be to crap what key be to lock.

Oh, it’s that time again. Insomniac rambling about daily life and such. Meaningless reports: nostalgia for the always incomplete end of bureaucratic culture. There’s still something vaguely sexy about the forgotten colonial outpost, and the dedicated functionary who sends in the dispatches, despite the fact that nobody’s reading them, and that the surveillance has lost all utility. Hmmm. The horror of banality. So here we go.

1. The kids are asleep. I’ve been saying that a lot, even when they aren’t, or not really. It has a nice ring to it. The kids are asleep. Variations: The kids are sleeping. Kids? Asleep.  …and a couple of kids of course. Them’s some sleeping kids. You might have fooled the Philadelphia, and joshed the Joliet, but you never did the Kenosha kid(s are sleeping). Are the kids asleep? Yup, they are.  It’s fun to say. Try it. The kids are asleep. On account of there’s two of them. Kids. Asleep.

2. Kids These Days – Two flicks I liked recently, with the usual proviso that “recently” for us means months or even a year old for normal people who can go to movies in actual theaters. First, Paranoid Park, Gus Van Sant’s continuing exploration and twisting of the American high school film. A clear follow-up to Elephant, even if not in the trilogy, complete with the continuous following shots of teenage boys walking. I noted this feature of Elephant in a discussion with Chuck from Austin once, and he made a good point: the frustration and boredom the viewer feels at the seemingly aimless, though clearly purposive walks mimics the boredom and aimless directionality of the American teenage experience itself. Elephant opens with what feels like a 10 minute sequence of the following shot; it feels like ten minutes, in the same way the last two minutes of sophomore level math felt like ten minutes, so you’re back there while watching the film, in the pointlessness of the educational system that you already know, by tenth grade, is cracked and broken. That it gets shot up or otherwise cut in half then seems like an afterthought, or at least something happening. If anything, Paranoid Park is even less moralistic and sentimental than Elephant (or Milk for that matter), and certainly seems less interested in pointing up some lesson about youth culture. Yes, it’s fucked like everything else. The film is also, maybe in the same way as The Lookout, about writing. I could see how various expressivist teachers would love this sort of thing, even if it leaves off ambiguously, to the extent that the main character has to write himself a meaning for a meaningless act. Maybe that’s high school, too. Second film, the Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In. For some reason, the version I got was dubbed rather than subtitled (truly the sign of a shitty distribution agreement), so some of the acting seemed off, but it maintained itself despite this thoughtless crime. Plot: Oskar, a weird little Swedish boy is bullied at school until he meets his new neighbor, a little girl vampire named Eli. The film is then their story. I’m not usually into horror or vampire films, but this one did good. It’s more a sweet little tale with the occasional and very subtle special effects. In one scene, for instance, the little girl scampers up the side of a hospital building seeking her guardian, a man who keeps her in blood through various murders until he screws up for the last time. Her insect-like climbing is a background effect, made more effective for being almost out of sight. Even the one real attack scene has a novel element, as the little girl clutches her victim like a child would, which suddenly seems eerily animalistic. It’s well done. These are both small films, mostly about people, with the sudden and nearly antiseptic introduction of gore.  Better, then, for being small. Of course, we get the sense that Eli’s previous guardian, who came to such a grotesque end in what seems to be his mid-fifties, was the last Oskar, perhaps engaged when he was himself a sweet and bullied little boy, and so the sweetness of the movie leaves off with this disastrous implication. Better, then, for cutting the saccharine with the ultimately dark suggestion. We also saw Frost/Nixon, which is engaging, if a little Karate-Kiddish. The Karate Kids are asleep.

3. Trips and Events – Our big summer trip will be to….State College, Pennsylvania. Oy. Some people go to Paris, etc. I’m going for some workshop that I applied for, while she and the kids are coming along because we know people there, etc. I wouldn’t call it a vacation destination, but it’s pleasant enough in the summer. So we’re probably going to drive out, and we’ll try to then make our way to upstate NY, maybe, but even that sounds dicey. That’s our vacation, essentially: one night in Ohio and a few in Happy Valley. I would have also gone to Montreal this summer for the ISHR conference, but I received notification that my paper was accepted in…April! Everybody else I know received acceptances in friggin’ November. And I’m fine taking the second cut after somebody else no doubt dropped, but I had just assumed that the non-notification was a rejection, not some limbo state waiting list sorta thing. So I’m not going. I have too much other stuff to finish up now to rev up that research bit again for these people who kept me dangling. It seems like an odd way to run things up there. Finally, if our last Big Night Out was kind of a catastrophe, our next promises, I hope, to be better. We’re going to pay ridiculous fees for some professional nanny-type to watch Ellie and Rafe, and we’re going to see Leonard Cohen at the Chicago Theater May 5. Just rah. Can’t wait.

So back to the colonial outpost, and the proverbial forgotten functionary. There’s always a strange local fever spreading mysteriously across the outpost in these things, and no less so now. Isn’t there a strange moment in every one of these plague panics (swine flu) when you think, just for a second, that you really should be scared, even though any disruption would be an inconvenience or worse? It’s like the first few pages of Camus when the rats start to come out of the sewers to die, or the first few pages of And The Band Played On, with the Kaposi’s sarcoma and pneumocystis carinii popping up all over the place – and you’re gonna be the one who is both alarmed, but much too jaded to act on it?  Maybe my usual disdain for being affected by media outbreaks is being blocked by the fact that the kids – these two kids – are asleep…

1. The Coolness – Last week, we had Ellie’s birthday party at Little Gym. These things have gotten much more complicated since I was a kid, but maybe in a good way. I remember bowling birthday parties (these were always fun) and, of course, the ubiquitous McDonald’s Birthday parties (we still don’t know how we’ll handle that one if it comes up, since we do not patronize McDonald’s, or any other fast food, for that matter). But these gym birthday parties are pretty snazzy. They have all kinds of wacky gym activities for the kids, when they’re not running around just raging on all the equipment. It looks damn fun, is all. Today, we went to yet another gym birthday party for a friend’s four-year old. Ellie fell down while she was running around a circle, and I think she got embarrassed, because she wouldn’t participate in any of the other organized activities, and she generally got very sullen. Is that right? Can a three-year old be embarrassed? And then you suddenly look down and this little blob of scream has some well-developed internal consciousness, and concern for the thoughts of others, and a burgeoning sense of self and all that. When did this happen? And, of course, it signals the fast impending date when they are embarrassed by you, when your very presence in the room is almost unspeakably mortifying to them, rather than seemingly their greatest source of joy. And we’re supposed to handle that moment how? A friend of mine has even written a book on “cool,” on the concept of cool, but I want more on this: what’s supposed to happen to your own sense of cool when your kid thinks you’re decidedly un-that. Ah, well. Maybe we have a couple of years yet on that. But seeing her today, seeing her feeling embarrassed, the realness of that day was just out there, and you have to face it.

2. The Wackness – Almost a year ago, I wrote about The Wackness before seeing it, tying it back to my own memory of that crazy New York summer of 1994. We finally got around to seeing the film last night. Now, in my typically obnoxious pre-viewing reviewing, I sniffed at the premise of the film, suggesting that its Manhattan setting and characters wouldn’t allow it to capture the feeling of that summer particularly well. Not working class enough. Not Outer Boroughs enough. Let me be the first to say that I was wrong about that. It’s a wonderful film, dead-on in creating that mood, and I just loved it.  I mentioned in my previous post that that summer had a kind of fin-de-siecle feel to it, a general euphoria seemingly derived from a feeling that everything was coming to an end. Apparently, I’m not the only one that remembers it that way, because the film just nails this theme, a Catcher in the Rye for the nineties, perfect. Everybody smokes pot, drinks 40′s of malt liquor, writes graffiti (even Ben Kingsley as the nostalgic therapist), and dreads the cultural transformations being wrought by the Giuliani regime. It’s exactly right on all of this. Everybody stays out all night, chases something, thumps Biggie somewhere in the background, and makes mixed tapes. The main character’s love interest tells him something like “You look at things the wrong way — I always see the dopeness in things, but you always see the wackness.” Everybody talks like that, yo, even in their most intimate and sincere moments. That’s how we talked, ridiculous as it now seems. But that was ours. And then the meta moment, the pomo-ness of it all, with Method Man playing Percy, the Jamaican drug dealer, talking to Luke Shapiro the drug dealer, while Method Man’s verse in The What pounds behind the scene: Yo I gets rugged as a muthfuckin’ carpet get… We’re supposed to get it: hey, that’s Method man acting and that’s Method Man’s verse.  I’m not sure my response to this film is portable, given that that time looms so large for me as this phase transition, becoming more what I now am, maybe, and less what I was, and having to face that. Leaving Queens, and everything that was, but everything it was leaving us as well, and we knew it, felt it. A whole way of life, as Raymond Williams says. Something was over. I know this is maudlin. But that was ours. I’m surprised this film tapped into it so well. And it wasn’t as maudlin as this description of it; it was even smart, and not condescending. I said in my previous review that it was a comedy. It’s not. Not at all.

Blah blah blah:

• she no longer works for troubled (American) Giant Financial Institution. Now she works for Giant Non-American Financial Institution. Doing more or less the same thing. Her team stormed out when they had another offer.  You basically don’t tell anyone you’re leaving until the day you leave, at which point you walk up to the Ops manager with a resignation letter and say “I’m going to such and such a place; please forward my personal belongings.” And storm out. This is the established protocol for what the industry calls “walking across the street.” I like this idea, and think there should be more of it.
• Cheap eats: Just around the corner, a kick ass Vietnamese bakery where I get a grilled pork sandwich (called Banh Mi) for $3.62. That’s Chicago on a shoestring. Yums.
• I find myself increasingly uncomfortable with Diego’s “Rescue Pack.” For those of you who don’t watch, Diego is an animal rescuer who goes on many advetures, well, rescuing animals. Whenever he gets in a particularly difficult jam, he calls on his handy “Rescue Pack,” which is a talking orange backpack he carries around, and which can only be “activated” by loud shouts of Activite!, in Spanish. Once activated, the Rescue Pack offers a set of options for escaping from the current dilemma. So, if the mischievous Bobo Brothers (two troublesome monkeys) cause an avalanche with their monkey business, the Rescue Pack – after a musical number that, in a disturbingly catchy tune, notes that the Rescue Pack is “coming to the rescue” – will offer up a bicycle, a dune buggy, and a sled, leaving you, the viewer, to choose which solution will most effectively deliver Diego from the monkey-caused snow event. And thus suddenly materializes a sled from the Rescue Pack, and Diego goes sledding down the avalanche to safety. Now I’m sure various child psychologists have their hands all over this thing and have determined that the choice between the means of escape promotes creative problem solving and all that. So I get the whole options thing, but it troubles me for three reasons. First, I’m a neurotic who gets worked up over stuff like this, but that’s a given. Second, it violates the most basic principles of Aristotle’s Poetics by building a deus ex rescue pack into every episode (as did the old Bat Man, but that’s another story). Finally, it gives the kids the idea that there’s an easy solution for every pressing problem. But, really, fourth, it confirms Aristotle’s argument for me, in that I am troubled by the deus ex machina for the same reason that Aristotle was really troubled by it. Formally the deus ex machina is an annoying and cheap device that disrupts the unity of the composition (the action should make sense internally, so you can’t build up an impossible situation only to rescue it with a new device that hasn’t yet been introduced into the ensemble). Fine. Every first year English major knows that. But I think Aristotle is, like me, more annoyed by the pedagogical force of the deus ex machina, in its reassurance that every problem, no matter how grave, comes packaged with a magical solution. This type of thing is deadly for a society, is the point.  So I’m troubled because I agree. But maybe, fifth, I’m really troubled because my father used to mouth sarcastic comments at stuff on teevee when I was a kid, and it absolutely drove me into a silent rage. He’d never just let the show be a show, and I hated that. And yet here I find myself saying stuff like “Oh, here comes the Rescue Pack…and a magic raft just in time to save Diego from the flood…what a miracle…” just as Ellie is yelling activite! activite! trying to get the damn Rescue Pack to open. So maybe, to set Aristotle aside and make it a Mommy-Daddy-Me thing, I’m really troubled because I’m turning into my father. Oedipus at last!
• I believe that once a car reaches ten years of age, it becomes eligible for a nickname. Not before.
• “The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fuck the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus
• If you’re looking for about the most depressing show on television, try The First 48. The premise is simple: most murders are solved within the first forty-eight hours, so this show follows homicide detectives in several cities as they investigate a murder – for the first forty-eight hours. Now, I’m a great lover of the murder show, whether it be an hour-long drama, the various “real forensics” shows, a two-hour Dateline special on some trial, or documentary like Paradise Lost or The Staircase. I will basically watch one of these shows at any hour of the day or night if I’m not busy, and I know this is a population effect, since now they have a network through which I can do just that (the Investigation Discovery Network). Point being, I know me my murder shows. But TF48 really takes the cake. What you learn watching the show is very simple: most murders are over piddling bullshit, done by sad people to sad people, done by dumb people, hastily, stupidly, and wretchedly. You learn that most suspects are identified not by wacky, futuristic DNA techniques, but by people calling in and reporting tips. You learn that most murders are solved not in some gotcha interview, but by the suspect simply confessing, without much pressure, with no lawyer present, and seemingly without regard for the complete wreck of their own lives. People kill each other over nothing – a silly drunken argument, three or four hundred dollars, or petty beefs escalated past any reasonable levels, poorly planned robberies gone awry, some agitated moment that soon passes. They leave obvious clues at the scene, and when I say obvious, I mean their own fucking cell phones. They tell everybody they know about it, and someone invariably calls the police. They tell ridiculous and non-credible stories before succumbing and confessing. It’s pathetic, in the classical sense. But the show is a good antidote to the other murder shows, which almost always include some complex plot or other that has to be untangled and leads to a complicated and suspenseful trial. These really do stand out because they are the exceptions, these “exciting” storylines. But mostly it’s just ugly and sad.
• On a brighter note, I’ll be reporting next week from my old home town of San Francisco, where I’ll be attending the annual 4C’s conference. You may have noticed that I only offered 15 of the Top 20 4C’s Presentation Mistakes last time, so I’ll be on the look-out for more. Hell, I may even commit some to fill out my list. Don’t kid yourself: the paper’s ready to go; I’m just fine-tuning the handout. But just to annoy my audience, I will be starting my presentation with a QUIZ. I was inspired by an internet quiz that asked you to determine whether the person in a picture was a porn star or a Fox News reporter. I scored 4 out of 10. Yeah, I groove like that.  So, Number 16: administering pointless quiz at the beginning of a presentation? Maybe! Stay tuned.

Yup yup.  It’s that time again.

• Victory! Having scarfed down about 20 chocolate chip cookies, there was no way I was going to get to sleep at my usual bedtime of 1am. But I tried anyway, tossing and turning and generally getting no closer to sleep. Then I watched as my daughter came scampering out of her room, headed for the bathroom. She went in, pulled down her pajamas and her pull-ups, sat on her potty, made her pee, dumped it, wiped, and flushed the toilet. In the middle of the night. This is a great victory in the Seven Red house, and I’m just so proud that I’m telling all you fine folks about it. Potty training was an ordeal, but what I’ve learned is that it’s a completely non-linear process. We worked on her for four months, through refusal, tantrums, false starts, hiccups, half-steps, half-a-dozen how-to books, and massive frustration. We were getting nowhere. Then, one day, I sat with her for about an hour and simply refused to let her leave the bathroom. She settled in, did her thing, and then took to it. Overnight. She went from refusing the potty and saying “I’m a BABY,” to using it all the time, as if by magic. It’s clear that she could have been potty trained earlier, but she just didn’t want to do it. But a night-time trip, completely self-motivated? It’s a beautiful thing.
• Irony! We live on the third floor of a three-flat, as they call them here in Chicago. Downstairs from us is a nice guy named Steven, who lives (I think) with his girlfriend (who I’ve never seen). Below them lives a couple who moved in when we did – the building had just been through a gut rehab, and we were the first tenants. The first floor couple are married, but they’re young, maybe in their mid-twenties. They fight all the time. It’s really unbelievable. I go out back to smoke, and I hear them two floors down in these brutal conversations, like “Can’t you even understand the question I’m asking you? Are you stupid? “Are you?” “I’m so sick of dealing with your shit!” All the time, like that. This qualifies, in my book, as “putting your business in the street,” and she knows that there is nothing I detest more than putting one’s business in the street. I don’t think she and I have ever had a fight in public, because as soon as one even comes close to starting, I mutter something like “business in the street” and disengage. And we don’t wonder whether they have the same fights inside. The basement of our building is a general storage area for all the tenants, and we put tons of stuff down there because we have almost zero closet space. So, from time to time we have to retrieve this or that from the basement. As it turns out, you can hear conversations in the first floor apartment pretty clearly from the basement. It goes like this: “I can’t fucking believe you. You asshole.” “Oh, like you’re better. Fuck you.” “God, something so simple and you still manage to screw it up.” Etc. All the time. Now the kicker for this came about three months ago. I was in my usual state of insomnia, and heard some ruckus outside at around 2:30am.It was so loud that it woke she up: some commotion in the street. We both went to the front window, and saw a very drunk woman laid out on the ground, with a man trying to pull her to her feet, tugging her arm roughly and yelling “Get up! You never fucking listen to me!” The woman was saying, screaming “I want to stay here!” “Get the fuck up!!” she and I looked at each other like – no, is that them, our neighbors? People started coming out of their buildings to see what was going on and help the woman into her house, and the police even came. Sure enough, it was our downstairs neighbors. A truer instance of putting your business in the street would be hard to imagine. The woman was literally in the gutter.  Two days ago, she was yelling at her husband to let her into the car, and he drove off while she was still gripping the door handle. This as I was walking up the block, so I reached our front door at the same time as she did. “Uh, how you doin’?” I asked awkwardly. So today I was coming in, and I bumped into Steven, the nice guy on the second floor, not connected with the first-floor couple. But he says to me,  mistaking me for the first floor guy (I had a hat and scarf on), “Sorry about the noise last night.” Huh? Then he sees that I’m his upstairs neighbor and says “Oh, sorry again. The first floor people were banging on the ceiling because we were being too loud.” I smiled. Nope, I would actually come down and knock on your door if that was happening. Since I’m like, an adult. We parted ways at the second landing. But I just had to laugh that the first-floor couple would have the nerve to tell other tenants to, um, lower the noise. Amazing. Now, she thinks that they shouldn’t be married. I agree. They seem to despise each other. But I will say that there is at least one activity they seem to enjoy doing together, and they are no less loud at that than they are in their fights. Let’s just say that I hear a lot when I am outside for my smoke breaks…
• Fluffy! We watched Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Eh. I can do without that Juno kid, for reals. Always with the same character. I get it, with the halting delivery and self-consciously charming not-like-the-other-high-school-guys bit. I really do. I’ve had a television series and now three movies to learn it, and I get it now. Basta! But I will say this. The movie gets exactly right the teenage all-night-Manhattan-trip, even down to the Rasta guys who invariably butt into your conversations. We used to do this occasionally when I was a teenager, especially after the rave clubs opened on Hudson Street, and it was always exactly like that. In similar news, we watched Zack and Miri Make a Porno last night. I also get the whole Seth Rogan bit. she calls it the “schlubby guy gets hot chick” appeal. For my part, I don’t think any of those Judd Apatow movies (and their various Roganesque offspring) are about women at all. They are about the intense pathology of the male friendship. The women in these movies are merely functions to contrast the male friendships. This is most obvious in Pineapple Express, but re-watch The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad, whichever, and tell me these aren’t primarily studies of the contemporary male friendship circle.
• Cookie! It’s all like Revolutionary Road up in here today. I made my ass-kicking Organization Man 1950′s Style Meatloaf and she baked a batch of her awesome cookies, which is why I’m still up writing this blog post at 2:56 in the morning. I should have been asleep for twenty minutes by now! (I don’t really sleep. It’s a personal failing). I won’t even try to describe the cookies. This is what the kitchen counter looked like at around 4:30 this afternoon:

• Pretty! As in, you think you’re so…

• Groovy! Michael White and the original Liberty Jazz Band were just incredible on American Routes today, playing live at the House of Blues in New Orleans. Knock you down good. We had it on when we were eating dinner, and I was just mesmerized by it, as I always am by good live jazz. There are worse ways to spend an hour than this, I assure you:

American Routes, February 21

What’s with all the crime fighting professors on my teevee? On CBS, they have a mathematician solving crimes in the utterly preposterous NUMB3RS. I’ve only seen one or two episodes of this show, but it apparently involves a mathematics professor who solves crimes by figuring out  criminal probability statistics and various other number-related aspects of criminality. There are actually interesting studies on this sort of thing; the locations of a string of crimes can “reveal” the likely place of the criminal’s residence to a remarkable degree of accuracy. Such analyses always seem to depend on a wide variety of social forces (transportation infrastructure, social codes on residential mobility, typical patterns of work and other schedules, etc.), but they are almost always reduced, when described in documentaries, to either psychological theories about “comfort zones” or even more cringe-inducing naturalism about “predators” and “hunting zones.” I’m sure some of this stuff comes into play, but the mathematician-criminologists will usually, in what I’ve seen, tend to see the statistical analysis as a reflection of some deeper and ahistorical phenomenon rather than as an effect of social processes  (although I have to believe that the studies account for social factors). Second, Tim Roth now apparently plays an anthropologist who helps determine whether various criminals are lying, his training in the workings of the Yanamamo culture presumably preparing him for this sort of thing. OK, I’ll admit that I’ve never seen one episode – or even minute – of Lie To Me, but it’s close enough to Numb3rs to suggest a trend. So how can the rhetoricians get in on the act?

Teevee show premise: a teacher of first-year composition is suddenly elevated into the national spotlight when her gaffe-plagued husband runs for Vice President. Hilarity ensues. No, wait. That really happened, and that’s a sitcom, not a drama. Teevee show premise: A rhetoric professor helps the police solve crimes by… By what? We know there are “forensic grammarians,” who analyze the writings submitted in one form or another by criminals. I saw some murder show on this point a few months ago, where the murderer tried to throw the police off his trail by writing a letter – supposedly from a third party – admitting to the crime. But the silly criminal had left grammatical DNA. To wit, he often used improper contractions of some sort, and these were found both in the fake confession letter and on his personal computer. Some forensic writing specialist nailed his ass to the wall on that one, and it was quite convincing. But these scientific analyses of grammatical patterns always ring a bit hollow, and where’s the excitement in that? Then there’s prose style. There are already “experts” who claim to “exclude” persons based on prose style. The low point for the Hillary Clinton campaign, in my view, was when several of her surrogates picked up the absurdist right wing slander – supposedly proven by “independent scientific analysis” – that William Ayers had actually written Obama’s books. Needless to say, one of the chief insults against skillful African American writers and orators has always been that they were merely parroting or plagiarizing some white person; indeed, the charge goes all the way back to Phyllis Wheatley (whose very ability to have composed a book of poems had to be attested to by a panel of examiners), and was subsequently launched against pretty much every prominent African American rhetor in American history, with Obama himself now included. The problem for rhetoricians is that they (and maybe I’m assuming here) usually take prose style to be an impersonal effect: prose style is precisely that which migrates across writers. The plagiarism detective thus kind of sucks, because she can recognize stylistic patterns, but can’t “exclude” suspects: there is no prose style DNA, theoretically or otherwise, because prose style is that which can be forged or imitated, imitatio, dissemination. So the sequence of arguments, then? The character of examples? The form of evidence?  No, ditto on imitatio. The rhetorician is plagued by – indeed proceeds by – the problem of of the simulacrum, as Plato already showed us.  She is the counter detective, the one who exonerates. But defense lawyer is too cliched for the rhetorician – the two are mired in slime as it is. We’ll need work on the premise. Perhaps the rhetorician will be like Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer, identifying the weak parts in the false story, the gaps in logic, the manufactured evidence, the tenuous warrant? Teevee show name: Available Means. We’re off and running.