Berlin Wall Fall – 20 years on

The wall came down and there was joy upon the land and across the world. Freedom for some from the grip of Soviet communism, and freedom for all from the specter of thermonuclear war. I had lived all my life under that threat, and, in the non-plutonium after glow of Good News, I rushed to East Europe to travel and eventually live and work.

Most of the meaningless utterances that have attended this anniversary are taken up with fatuous discussion of who was more responsible for the collapse of the wall Gorbachev or Reagan [who would win in a fight Plastic Man or the Brown Bubble?]. Few have mentioned the saddest legacy of the fall – the almost instantly nuked peace dividend. Somehow there was meant to be one, and there were some token base closings, but really, how long did it last?

Imagine if, instead of shouldering our way into three hot wars since then we had reinvested that peace dividend. Imagine if, instead of paying all that extra money to the oil companies because of “instability in the region,” we had instituted a—horrors!-- $.50 per gallon national tax on gasoline. Imagine…

If there’s one thing that historic moment taught me, and that I am painfully reliving in this historic moment as we grasp like blind mole rats for some pathetic excuse for national health care, it is this: Preserving freedom in America has come to mean preserving the freedom of our corporate bodies—the national military industrial complex’s freedom to expand its budget and the private health care system’s freedom to gouge the citizens of this nation. Teabaggers and Support Our Troop-ists have been artfully convinced to fight for the rights of Aetna, Lockheed and Merck.

Twenty years ago, as I watched modern history rekindle from my perch in the newly free east Europe [Prague to be specific], I made my peace [somewhat] with the last time history had raised her bloody head in that part of world. I tracked down the remnants of Eastern European Jewry in general and kicked over the traces of my family’s past in particular. At the time, as I watched Fascism and anti-Semitism perk up and stretch their deformed limbs as if arising from under a pile of pig shit after a forty year slumber, there was one thing I took away from that historic moment that I am painfully reliving in this historic moment: like it or not, most peoples get the government they deserve.

In yet another example of why I am the world’s worst blogger, slogger would be the more appropriate term, I submit the following. I started this piece in September 08 when Sarah Palin was having her moment. It has proven a difficult piece to edit and I’m afraid it will never be entirely right, but I must move on...


I Understand Addiction


I understand addiction. I believe almost all of us contend with it in some form or other. Some addictions take less benign forms and may, therefore, seem less benign. However, the true danger in addiction is not in the thing we may be addicted to, but in how we manage our addictions. An addiction to gum could end up killing you—while an addiction to heroin, if very carefully managed, can endure into a ripe old age [see William Burroughs]. The worst though is thinking that you could cured of an addiction as if it is were an external agent, a disease.

I understand the whole Sarah Palin thing and the Bush thing before that. It’s not about white women and family values. It’s about addiction. Or denial. Denial being the core of addiction. Hiding in the thing rather than facing the other thing. We as a nation have been trying to ignore that we are a part of the world for as long as we’ve been a part of the world.

Now, we are mounting one last attempt to deny the reality of the world even as it crashes around us. The Reagan revolution helped us forestall facing that reality. Pushed time back for a generation. As the world has gotten closer to our shores, the need to block it out has become more desperate. We’ve had to hit the vein ever harder and with crazier mixes. We didn’t care where the shit came from or how dubious it seemed [W a man of the people? Sure, I’ll buy it and give me a hit of China White too].

The late David Foster Wallace, who took his life on September12, 2008, will be greatly missed. Motherfucker could write. Infinite Jest had more soul in its jacket cover than The Corrections had in its entire body. A major thread of the book is addiction. One character, so beautiful she has taken to wearing a veil for all the trouble her beauty has caused her, has the added burden of being a crack addict. Her addiction at once became so intense that she took to picking over the fibers of her carpet for stray white specks—whether or not these specks proved to be crack didn’t matter, she’d smoke them anyway.

Sarah Palin is the Reactionary Right’s last speck of crack dug out from the wall-to-wall carpet we laid in our mildewy rec room 30 years ago. Rather than hitting the pipe, a certain strata of America started taking regular hits of god and guns [yes, that line] and that particularly unreflective approach to patriotism.

Palin represents the last run: one last chance to deny the fact that the USA is not the center of the universe, that the rest of the world matters, that evolution is a basic tenet of nature and that global warming is real. There are so many things I would like to not believe in: cholesterol, aging, saving money. It is painful to think about these things and hard to deal with their reality, so sometimes rather than face them I hide in my various addictions.

The Reagan era gave us an uncontrolled crack epidemic. Then the Reagan era offered us damnation and redemption in the form of mandatory drug testing and rehab. The myth of rehab is that you can cure addiction, get clean. You can’t cure addiction, you can only shift it laterally, sublimate or manage it.

In order to manage addictions—first they must be acknowledged for what they are, but not judged. I grant people their religion and their patriotism and even their guns just so we can move along to the real issues like poverty, education, global warming, crumbling markets, the failure of unilateralism and the decline and fall of the American Empire.

I will always be prone to addictive behavior. I can quit smoking, but then I might shift to painkillers. The form changes but the urge is the same, it is the urge to hide. The myth that we can cure addictions is the most pernicious outcome of the notion that addictions are diseases in the physiological sense. It is no coincidence that the U.S. entered its least reflective, post-psychological phase during the Reagan era. The man declared war on sex and drugs and all of a sudden everyone was an addict of something but addiction was a disease that could be cured if you made your penance and received absolution in the form of rehab and renunciation. Defining everything as a disease was the silver bullet that made so much else possible. With everyone taking the cure, finding the 12 step religion, bowing their sweaty heads in contrition, the last ounce of counterculture rebellion was effectively snuffed out. Drugs became less a poor way of dulling the edge of hard realities faced or of exploring the contours of the mind, than at best alternate booze and at worst performance enhancers. Without drugs, the nation turned its lonely eyes to other more pernicious forms of denial. Flags and fags and god and guns trump facing the consequences of our behavior in the world and taking responsibility for our actions as stewards of it.

You would have thought that after 8 years of W, a binge of blind faith and pure avoidance [it’s no coincidence that Bush is a reformed alcoholic etc. who now denies the world through the cocaine rush of evangelical patriotic zeal], that folks would have been willing to swear off some of this shit and they did, but only for the length of one hungover day at work. As soon as our buddy came along with a whiff of something good—no matter how fucking bad we knew it would be, no matter if we knew it would cost us our job, our wife, our nation’s wealth and standing in the world—all that was readily sacrificed because of a little taste of the good stuff. Forget that this shit is pure shred. Hooking on to Palin is like smoking carpet lint. She is so clearly rock bottom. The desperation is so clear because the reality is almost impossible to stave off any longer—no wonder they had to go outside the lower 48 to find someone out of touch enough to peddle this crap.

In the end and after much thought, I believe I know what killed David Foster Wallace. I have been afraid to analyze a man I never knew and who was so clearly a genius and therefore existed in a different sphere of logic and dreaming from the rest of us, but what the fuck. In the end what killed him was the fact that he could not escape his own culture. A white Christian boy who came of age in the 80s, he ultimately believed in rehab and redemption and that one could be free of dependence and addiction and become purged and pure and saved—or die trying. Wallace had been suffering from hardcore depression since college and had endured the life of his mind with the help of an early powerful anti-depressive drug he’d been taking since the late 80s. In the summer of 08 he tried to get free of that drug. He wanted to cleanse himself and be able to function within the contours of his beautiful mind unsullied by external taint. He killed himself that autumn. Some see his act as noble, trying to get free; to me it’s the same sad and reckless denial of our nature that has landed us here on the precipice of nothing good.

I Will Watch the Watchmen

One of the great joys of The Watchmen is that not only is it about anti-heroic superheroes, but it is anti-heroic and anti-comic in structure. Written after the Star Wars phenomenon began to change most films into comics, The Watchmen helped change comic books into novels. The graphic novel blew up in the 80s with mind-blowing works such as The Dark Knight, Sandman and Sin City, but although each of those titles put forth excellent stand alone efforts most were written as series. The Watchmen could only ever have been a one off and you know that in your bones going in—it offers up a complete world, takes up its history and posits a future. A truly finite work is rare these days, rarer still is one with a great third act—a third act that leaves the world slightly changed.

Besides serializing and syndicating every frame of film that came after it, the Star Wars altered the very structure of the movies that got made in its wake [although, oddly enough, this did not hold true for A New Hope, which had a fairly slow build] . As we know, with the rise of the blockbuster era most movies, in pursuit of greater punch and bigger first weekends, started front loading the crap out of themselves. More and more films were launched with more and bang before the credits—if there even were credits. Exposition was for losers.

It would seem that if you feed people corn long enough, eventually they are going to shit corn, and since the notion of front loading came to prominence everything from film to tv to comics and the novel has been infected by that approach. Even most authors who came of age post Star Wars sucked on the tit of big first scenes and suck at endings. They have the same pressure to grab the reader early and often, and sell books based on perfectly wrought first chapters. The rest, well, fuck third acts—you can’t make a living off great third acts. But you can make immortal works of art with them.

The Watchmen has a very slow, uncanny build. At times you feel like the piece will never lift off and yet you stay with it. Rereading it, the story came back to me—in a slow build. The end fits together brilliantly, but even that has an anti-climactic bittersweet bite to it. Moore has a depressive’s mind, but it is a mind that is inexorably trying to overcome its own darkness.

I will be watching Zack Snyder. Not just to see if the man who put buff men in diapers and made it work can improve on the original’s slightly underwhelming but apt visuals, but to see if he will dare to create an anti-blockbuster blockbuster. I will be watching to see if Snyder will be able to create goofy realistic anti-super superheroes, if he will have the guts to maintain the historical sweep of Cold War America so important to the piece, but mostly I will be watching to see if he will manage to resist the temptation and no doubt he pressure to follow the standard Syd Fields formula that has been handcuffing Hollywood for 30+ years. Batman Returns certainly made it possible for mega-blockbusters to venture into new creative territory. It remains to see if anyone else will follow.


Coraline

Coraline is one film that successfully resists the shackles of Syd. Gradual and abrupt in turns like its sophisticated stop action/computer animation format, Coraline’s story proceeds like a dream and resists those classic event markers that are even more prevalent in animated films than they have become in live action films.

The most resonant image to take away from Coraline occurs once she passes beyond the borders of the Other House’s property—the Other Mother only created what was necessary. When Coraline gets far enough away the animation begins to fail and break down to a white back drop. While this moment is not new, the geniuses at Warner Bros. did this to Daffy Duck decades ago, it does seem very timely as our economy recedes and shrinks back so that only what is necessary remains.

Bag Props for Hendrik Kerstens






















Found this guy when I clicked on a photo of Scarlett Johansson as Girl with a Pearl Earring. He poses his daughter, a younger, chubbier, less groomed version of Johansson in poses from Vermeer and other Flemish masters [or in their spirit]—but with arch and subtle twists.

Some of his other pics: girl against barren sea, little girl in makeup—more expected/less enchanting. Overall, though, surprising, odd and immaculate photos.

http://www.hendrikkerstens.com/index.html

The United States of Tara

Toni Collette in The United States of Tara

Is there anything more potentially embarrassing, off-putting, fatuous and multifariously insulting than the upcoming The United States of Tara on Showtime?

The tag line on the commercials I've heard spoken by Collette herself is:

Having multiple personalities is like hosting a kegger in your brain.

That's the best they could pull from the wreckage? This is what Diablo Cody has wrought of her Academy Award gold?

Why is the show insulting and to whom? People afflicted with dissociative identity disorder probably do not feel like they are hosting keggers--in their minds or otherwise--ever, but I can't precisely speak to that. I have not known anyone afflicted with dissociative identity disorder. I have, however, known schizophrenics with less sit-com compatible forms of the disease and they, to a person, are most assuredly not hosting frat mixers in their brains.

On a broader scale of offensiveness, why is Collete's "normal/original/baseline" persona Tara? Tara is, as described in the show's literature,

...a working mother of two who paints nursery room murals that totally rock and sometimes doesn’t feel like herself.

No, Showtime, you rock--you self-serving cable slum!

Why can't Tara's "real" personalility be the dude? That can't happen of course because no woman would ever really have a male personality? Certainly not on Showtime. Though I have etched in my mind several brilliant and enduring images to the contrary from the recently closed Catherine Opie retrospective at the Guggenheim. Her photo masterpieces of diversely gender identified individuals and families display more genuine humanity than a lifetime of Showtime.

Of course it would be even more beyond the pale for the brain trust behind the show [among them Steven Spielberg] to contemplate Collette's normal personality as being the retro mom, Alice. Alice, again from the literature,

...is the perfect homemaker who believes in good, traditional values and bakes cakes that would make Betty Crocker jealous.

It would have been completely too risque for Alice to have been her "real" personality. At least Hilary Swank made lady dudes sort of cool, but traditional homemakers?

Neither Buddy nor Alice could be real people in Showtime demographic land, they are merely funny and pathetic ciphers compared to the real women meant to watch the show [as Showtime attempts to stuff more and more working mothers of two into its dope dealing, bogus lesbian pie hole]. No doubt, however, we will come to love her inferior, loser personalities in spite of how superior we [and Tara] are to them. Yech.

Futrhermore, as a dude, I get pretty insulted by the way some women actors play men. Milton Berle had more insight into women when he played one [wigless and smoking a cigar] than Collette has into men when she plays Buck who...

...is a fan of beer and motorcycles who’s always up for a good night at he titty bar and isn’t afraid to kick some ass.

Wow! Could this project get any more nuanced?

But hey, lest the men folk become put off, The United States of Tara has shoe-horned in one more personality to appease us. Just for us emotionally stunted dudes out there forced to watch the show with our de rigueur mothers of two, they chucked in a hot teenager personality for Collette! Count me in!

Yech again.

It's a pity that Collette, who broke into film as a talented young actress playing a young woman totally against stereotype in "Muriel's Wedding," has chosen to play to and abuse so many stereotypes in what reeks of eau de talented actress vehicle.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a cake to bake.