OK, at this point taking potshots at the NYT for blindingly insipid reportage is a lot like hunting for pigeons with an silenced Uzi, but still, i cannot let this go past without taking an offbalance swipe at it:
In the partnership survey, the most frequent reasons given by drivers for shunning public transportation were the freedom to come and go as they liked and the ability to avoid dealing with other people. Mr. William — who lives within 10 minutes of a subway station in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, but said he drove into Manhattan below 60th Street every day — put himself in that camp, saying, “I am just really more comfortable in my car.”
SOMEONE GOT PAID TO WRITE THAT.
some other news pegs for April 2008:
:: Reporting suggests that US Army is overwhelmingly composed of blue-collar types
:: Panhandler asks tourist for change, explains it was easier than turning around his life and starting a minimum-wage job
:: Astronaut lonely sitting in his tin can far above the world
Monday March 31st 2008, 12:00 pm
Filed under: meatface
underloved cultural bone-marrow-enrichment group Doc Films just dropped what is possibly my favorite conceptual series in 8+ years of semi-attentiveness: Impossible Adaptations.
Monday, March 31 – 7:00
Naked Lunch
David Cronenberg, 1991 – 115 min.
David Cronenberg, the world’s greatest living director, adapts William S. Burroughs. The novel’s disconnected, cut-up structure, its incongruous, wildly offensive, and tonally divergent routines, and its hallucinatory and flamboyantly pansexual imagery make straightforward filming impossible. Instead, what he delivered is a bizarre hybrid of Burroughs’ novel, his biography, and Cronenberg’s cavalcades of meat and fluid: a film as trapped between two competing sensibilities (Cronenberg’s and Burroughs’) as Hitchcock and Selznick’s Rebecca. Come for the William Tell routine; stay for the Mugwump jism. 35mm.
Monday, April 7 – 7:00
Ulysses
Joseph Strick, 1967 – 140 min.
Common consensus is that Joyce’s great novel is the very definition of the impossible adaptation: mammoth in scope, endlessly allusive in structure, and microscopic in its attention to detail both physical and psychological. It must have taken self-confidence bordering on hubris for award-winning documentarian Joseph Strick to set himself the task – and perhaps he even succeeds. Brilliant or demented, his dedication and vision are everywhere in evidence. Whether a grand experience of cinematic transformation or an instance of mid-brow kitsch, it’s unforgettable. 35mm.
Introduced by Assistant Professor Liesl Olson.
Monday, April 14 – 7:00
Time Regained
Raoul Ruiz, 1999, 158 min.
Reviewing this rendering of Proust’s multi-part novel that adapts almost exclusively from the concluding section, Jonathan Rosenbaum described Time Regained as ‘inviting the spectator who knows Proust to engage in a dialogue with it and the unitiated spectator to get lost in the swirling patterns of an enchanting and highly entertaining trailer.’ Ruiz uses his mastery of cinematic techniques to flatten the linear time of film into a tremendous and moving moment of infinite possibility and relationship, one in which all that can be connected is shown, magically, to already be so. In French with English Subtitles 35mm.
Monday, April 21 – 7:00
Christabel
James Fotopoulos, 2001, 74 min.
A rendering of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, Christabel presents itself as a kind of internal travelogue, following the titular character in her relationship with another woman. Fotopoulos wrote, ‘One of the reasons I like that poem is that it’s so interior – it’s like a barrage of imagery close to the type of fragmentation that I try to do in my movies,’ and said, ‘One way most adaptations fail is they focus on one aspect of something. But it’s impossible to focus on one aspect of anything. You have to head in, and take on all the aspects. 35mm.
Monday, April 28 – 7:00
Home, Sweet Home
D. W. Griffith, 1914 – 70 min.
One of Griffith’s experiments in constructing feature-length films, Home, Sweet Home uses John Howard Payne’s popular song as its structuring device, telling multiple thematically connected stories. The framing tale tells Payne’s own story, covering his life as an unhappy but brilliant playwright, composer, and world traveler. Intercut with this are three dramatizations of his song, each exploring a different facet of its redemptive power. Featuring nearly every member of Griffith’s lead actors, including Mae Marsh, Blanche Sweet, Courtnay Foote, Donald Crisp, Dorothy Gish, and Lillian Gish as an angel. 16mm.
Monday, May 5 – 7:00
Mourning Becomes Electra
Dudley Nicholas, 1947 – 112 min.
Master screenwriter Nichols (Stagecoach, The Informer, Bringing Up Baby) adapted and directed Eugene O’Neill’s epic, itself a transposition of Greek mythology into the American Civil War. In transforming the six-hour behemoth to film, Nichols constructs a quiet masterpiece of exacting composition, of precision staging, of piercing, interrogatory camerawork. The degree of radical fidelity to his source that Nichols embraces, while at the same time cutting more than half of the script away, brought his film scorn from highbrow critics in 1947, but it is the reason that today the film demands reevaluation. 35mm.
Monday, May 12 – 7:00
Under the Volcano
John Huston, 1984 – 112 min.
Malcolm Lowry’s towering achievement of a novel follows the final day of Geoffrey Firmin, a hopeless alcoholic who recently left his job as a diplomat in Quauhnahuac, Mexico, and whose marriage exploded when his wife and brother had an affair. John Huston’s film, part of the masterful end-game of his career, brings clinical, painfully distinct imagery in place of Lowry’s gothic mental meanderings. Forcefully evacuated of interiority, Huston’s characters move as tragic automata programmed for disaster, literalizing the metaphorical use Lowry had for setting his narrative on the Day of the Dead. 35mm.
Monday, May 19 – 7:00
Quick Billy
Bruce Baillie, 1967-70 – 56 & 16 min.
Baillie described this as a ‘horse opera in four reels,’ adding that it is ‘a kind of interior documentary’ formulated as a rendering of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. A record of Baillie’s near-death from hepatitis and its aftermath, filmed over the course of three full years, in the course of which the viewer metaphorically enters into the underworld, is transformed, and finally released back into the world through the power of light itself. 16mm.
Following the feature, six short reels of film shot for, but unused in, Quick Billy will be shown
Monday, May 26 – 7:00
Passages from Finnegan’s Wake
Marry Ellen Bute, 1965-67 – 97 min.
A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce’s polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly post-New Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion – 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances – she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel’s nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure. 16mm.
Monday, June 2 – 7:00
Wisconsin Death Trip
James Marsh, 1999 – 76 min.
Michael Lesy’s experimental, fanciful, and beautiful 1973 book is a collection of newspaper articles and photographs from Black River Falls, Wisconsin, written and shot in the 1890s. It’s a chronicle of disease, tragedy, madness, murder, arson, and horror. Adapting less the brief stories excavated from newspapers, director Marsh focuses instead on the astounding photographs. Above all, Marsh’s film is a frightening and sobering challenge to the stability and value of the American Dream, of Western expansion, of the peaceable and tranquil influence of civilization. Ian Holm narrates.35mm.
Ian Holm! Wisconsin Death Trip! GIT THEM HOES! I dunno about the two whole servings of unfilmable Joyce. Anybody got any better ideas for unfilmable things that somehow got filmed
Tuesday March 25th 2008, 3:47 pm
Filed under: a maiden's sigh
installment two of Fuck You Tuesday: Death of American Humanity via Advertising. Previous i discussed an ad for abstract post-secondary degrees that spoke to soulgreed and not to say, the actual sapient desire to get a degree that you could then use for a specific reason. Today i am discussing a frequent bee-in-bonnet problem i have vis a vis ads that cough, rebrand, violence against your fellow man as humor. Herewith: Cheetos: A Case Study.
Robert Riccardi, managing partner at Goodby Silverstein (the ad agency behind the new campaign), says that Chester’s mischievous new personality stems from the idea that “powering down” Cheetos as an adult “feels like a nonconformist moment.
dudes have at the “powering down”* of Chester Cheetah here and there but the thing i want to tell you is that cheetos are apparently no longer for kids and proto-diabetics so much as they are for UNCHRISTIAN ASSHOLES.
if you’ll observe the video evidence, you will see that the hallucinating white demi-hipster responds to a rude encounter by sabotaging the bitch’s white laundry with cheetos. funny, maybe if you hate bitches. but this ties into my stepmom’s latent kulturkampf against advertising: she’s hypothesized, since at least 2002, that all humor in advertising is simply absurdist violence and the “joke” is a question more of timing or surprise than it is of actually being funny. for instance, the commercial wherein a woman wrestles with a raw turkey carcass before inadvertently throwing it through a window and crushing her beloved’s skull with it, contains zero actual jokes, yet everyone involved in making and watching can easily tell you that it’s *intended* to be funny. anyway, what the fuck is funny about ruining a stranger’s laundry? everything, apparently.
this is my wrinkle to the violence-as-appeal theory of advertising culture: emotional violence is far more prevalent, and if you run fast enough/stretch your arms out further you can make a case that almost every single current document of television advertisment that isn’t the classical “here is our thing/service. here is the price. here is our contact information” betrays this truth ultimately. if the ad doesn’t contain absurd cartoon violence, say, throwing a rock at someone’s forehead to win a game of RPS for a can of light beer, it probably contains spiritual violence, or a deus lo volt, Claremont moment call to emotional violence against your fellow humans. Such as, Cadillac ads featuring sneering Calvin-Klein-zooted metalface yuppies (sorry Cedric Daniels, I still respect your needs and desires as an artist): the implicit premise of those particular ads is: Cameron’s car is a piece of tin. You’re better than Cameron: herewith: an opportunity to buy Cameron’s dad’s Ferrari Cadillac. I’m verging on imcomprehensibility so, instead, pictures:
Tom Frank and god knows how many people know and say things such as this a lot better than this conservative small-town peace officer can or will. but still, it felt nice to get that off my chest.
Also, full disclosure, to be honest, I didn’t bother watching the ad with sound on, so I don’t know what the cheetah tells her. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s kind of funny.
Whatever whatever whatever. Writing two paragraphs with semi-consistent punctuation and a video link tired me out, so i’m done. Fuck you guys.
Also, as like a PPS, I want to reiterate that I don’t read Slate, i only read people ripping Slate. Which I guess makes me the blogocratic dipshit equivlanet of Tom from Metropolitan’s only reading literary criticism instead of literature itself. But I am moved to add this disclaimer/sorry petulant fart to end my sorry petulant post because i saw a guy on the bus reading Newsweek (a guy who works in my office) and even though I would totally look at a copy of newsweek if i found it, and don’t midn it terribly, I would never read it on a bus. I certainly wouldn’t be seen reading it on a bus. I dunno. More thoughts on elitism in re mega-circulation magazines maybe never.
* footnote on “powering down”: if there was such an orthographic tool as squiggly quote marks, this is the type of occasion for which i would use said tool.
Wednesday March 19th 2008, 9:25 am
Filed under: meatface
Editor James Ledbetter describes The Big Money as “a general interest site for people who have an interest in money and financial affairs and economics … but not specifically or necessarily who work in the finance industry.” The site is expected to launch this summer.
so i was going to post some kind of ruminant paragraph about how i don’t understand the whole Eliot Spitzer festival of hate, i mean, bill clinton Xed someone with a cigar in the oval office on national television and we didn’t all swallow our retainers about it. but apparently spitzer (browface, in the words of BQA) was kind of a dick about stuff, so it makes a bit of sense that he deserves to get his nose rubbed in it to remind him of what he did to the rug. anyway i can’t think of anything anyone could have said that would be better than the fact that the dude from Girls Gone Wild offered the lady in question $1million to get naked for him but then in turned out, she had already been in like a week’s worth of their videos in the recent past, they had just forgotten about it. well, a woman’s character is her fate or something.
Wednesday March 12th 2008, 9:25 am
Filed under: meatface
this is a placeholder. i read Measuring the World by Daniel Kellmann and am formulating shits on it. but mostly i want to share the comic-book looking picture of alexander von humboldt as huck finn. it is weird when your national version of thomas jefferson was also a gay mountaineer and science genius.
Tuesday March 11th 2008, 12:01 pm
Filed under: a maiden's sigh
This ad has been annoying me for weeks. It’s not even for anything specific, unless you count “enrolling at DePaul” as specific. In my imagination, it’s clearly for an MBA program or some kind of professional degree, because that’s all you can draw from the stupid picture. Herewith, the inaugural specie of Shambolic Advertising Criticism Tuesdays here at Banana Nutriment.
1) Why is he making that face? Does indispensability have physical side effects I’m not being told about?
2) Is he in charge of keeping people off that balcony? Is that his role?
3) Who would see this ad and say, yes, THAT’S IT. NOW I KNOW WHAT MY SHIT WAS MISSING. SHITTY MODERN-CUT SUITS, HAIR GELS AND BALCONIES. AND HAZE. AND NO MORE OF THOSE TIRESOME, “THE MAN” NECKTIES.
why this ad bothers me, short version: because it’s advertising a lifestyle choice that’s crucial to your identity and role in life vis-a-vis the kind of clothing you get to wear and the kind of contented, sour face you get to make. this might fly for like, the marines or the colonial fleet, but it’s weird. when i put on the plastic crown of neofeudalism and stew on this, i start to resent this ad for even implying people should expect a choice as to how their life goes, but in a more modern, um, less implausible approach, i resent this ad for pointing up, even tacitly, that the reason people choose the careers they choose is not because they might enjoy the work or its results but that they cherish the power trip the work might represent. i guess it’s just a different kind of power trip to hope to be able to sleep at night without twitching or dosing yourself.
I am wont to get shit in my teeth and just tug until the rope toy breaks or people get tired of tugging back (or hugging back, nahmean) but this seems like a spot of socioromantic cleavage that’s really worth dropping an ice cream cone into. This ad effortlessly personifies many things that I associate with the death of the individual and the ritual group-forgetting of um, well, liberal thought. There’s probably some kind of deep-thought disassociative thing here about how we read shapes instead of words but let’s table (read: ignore forever) that for now (ever). What the fuck is a degree in business? Of course, the question comes begging, what the fuck is a degree in anything. But god damn, how can you be interested in “business”? Maybe from an evolutionary psych perspective these wankers are actually more fit to live than me, since their self-determined thing is getting paper by whatever retarded job description they have to answer to, while mine is apparently the more elusive “try to feel good about your life.” whatever whatever. i will be over here working on recondite manuscripts and loathing my fellow man.
final reading question
1) is it better to know what you want and fail to get it or just to get something?
Sunday March 09th 2008, 11:51 am
Filed under: meatface
good old math, in his sweater vest.
whatever. watch this space for either a poem about finding love in the kleptonarcocratic future or an ad for printer cartridges. or both. can you hear her calling, and what she said.
Recent documents of supremacy:
The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty. no not related to me. although he is my brother under the skin.
The Virgin Spring. am new to this Bergman shit but this is not what i expected. i was expecting austere cinema of the interior life, plus bleak landscapes. instead i got a movie where an annoying teenager gets violently raped then the dudes who did it accidently stop at her family’s house for snacks, and then her father kills them all with his bare hands. also she was on the way to drop off candles at church to honor the holy virgin (also she was not a virgin, although she was supposed to be). slightly more of a jam than i was expecting, or at least much more sonorous. still it’s not really a “popcorn” movie. well, actually, maybe it is. this is what knife in the water would have been like if A) it was better (not that it isn’t ok) B) someone else directed it C) it happened in medieval sweden instead of 1960s poland lake district. also: i am just now realizing that Funny Games overtly references Knife in the Water.
Walker: i would not have expected the director of Repo Man to deliver a psychotic joe strummer-scored (the score is nothing special save for one piece) retard-epic about a deluded american goaded into invading Nicaragua by a drunken Cornelius Vanderbilt. this helps me to understand the Ed Harris thing. i cannot stress to my compatriots enough that they should probably see this movie RIGHT NOW.
other jams to be explicated in due time:
Low Life by Luc Sante (finally got around to finishing it)
Magical Urbanism (my Mike Davis rampage is in remission for a minute, but not because i don’t want to read more Mike Davis)
