Life On Uranus

Tonight
We were saved by a serendipitous exit.
Must be the holy ghost
or Albert Ayler,
why else would I suddenly need incense?
I had to Anne Frank it
I had to send silent signals
But I didn’t hold back any sneaky laughter
(my finicky hands can keep a secret)
and the Idol Man can be quizzed until the moon collapses
until Alabama dims into a red midnight.

I guess that’s part of the game,
Gotta train eyes in my hair like eagle follicle spies
and let my hide thicken as I wander the outskirts.

From now on, I keep my whims in my Talisbag
Praise Allah.

2009
A short play

Earl - A Spider Crab
Percy - A Second Spider Crab

Setting:
Decaying carcass of a sperm whale on the bottom of a depthless ocean.

Darkness. Spotlight on PERCY entering a landscape of decay. He pecks at
the carcass selectively, examining before eating. Percy begins to feel the
rhythm of his pecking and chewing. He begins a beat that turns into a dance
until he freezes in a disruptive silence. Percy waltzes.

PERCY (singing to the tune of "Wild is the Wind")
As a cater -pillar weaves through a tree, so -my darling -weave through me-

Percy stops. He doesn't know the words.

PERCY (singing again)
As a cater weaves through a tree -so my darling weave through me.

Percy stops again, EARL enters but Percy doesn't notice.

PERCY (singing)
As a pillar weaves through a tree - so my darling weave through me.

Percy stops again.

EARL
The words are wrong.

Percy screams in surprise

PERCY
What have you seen?

EARL
It's too dark to see anything, stupid.

PERCY
What have you heard?

EARL
I don't know... something that I've heard before.

PERCY
That's impossible, I was composing.

EARL
You mean transcribing?

PERCY
No, this was all me.

EARL (circling around Percy)
...

PERCY
...

EARL
Well, you've still got the words all wrong. 

PERCY
Well, what are they then?

EARL
I know because I've definitely heard this before.

PERCY
Then fucking tell me something about it!

EARL
About what?

PERCY
What are the right words then? Where did you hear it? Or where, in this
goddamn abyss, did you encounter any such trace of music.

EARL
...

PERCY
Say something!

EARL
Jesus, I don't know what song's called... and I can't remember what the
actual words were. But I remember the shapes of its sounds.

PERCY
The what?

EARL
The contours of the music... I don't know what exactly the right words are,
but I can tell you that you got the words wrong.

PERCY
You mean the "contours" were wrong?

EARL
Yea, and-

PERCY
Has it ever occurred to you that maybe the "contours" sounded different
because it's my own damn composition.

EARL
Well... maybe you think that. You've probably heard it around when I heard
it and the melody lingered in your brain, hiding in the wood works like a
sleeping ghost. And now you're trying to call it back but you can't remember
its name.

PERCY
Fuck you, I can sort my own thoughts.

EARL
I'm just saying... I know that I've taken memories as if I've invented
them.

PERCY
...

Earl begins pecking at the carcass

PERCY
Tell me where I could have heard it then?

EARL
Well... here.

PERCY
In this hole?

EARL
Sure. Right here.

PERCY
When, then? ... When?!

EARL (shrugging)
In the past... say about a couple of months ago.

PERCY
Months ago?

EARL
Say, four months ago?

PERCY
Four months ago is now. It's the same. The same blackness, the same rotting
aftertaste, the same air of over-fermentation... I'm asking "Where is the
wine?" I feel drunk, but my friends are all cherubs, too deaf even to
condemn. But I've been roaming this wasteland, this revolving nothingness
since I can remember. Whenever I run into someone, it's like being beached
on a bare island, only there's more of a sense of thrusting. It's such a
moment of shock, such an obscure moment... Really it's only during these
moments that you can ramble about memories and time, because otherwise it's
all seems much the same... So I've decided to make music -to compose.

EARL
Things aren't the same when you're composing, are they?

PERCY
Sure they are. But I compose so that I can sing for you and play for you if
I ever run into you... To numb the shock.

EARL
Of the running into? What if I like my shocks raw?

PERCY
Then you won't remember a damn thing, much less any stray melodies... and
that's why I'm singing, so that you'll remember this song and this moment
and maybe even this here composer... 

Pause, Percy is very pleased with his words. Earl remains silent.

PERCY
It seems like you... are mistaking your "nows" for past memories.

EARL
That's exactly what I admitted to you earlier.

PERCY
So am I wrong?

EARL
Yes.

PERCY
You piece of shit.

EARL
Say what you want about the darkness and pressure, these hills here were
kicking four months ago.

PERCY
Kicking?

EARL
Are you kidding me? Do you know where we're standing? We're on body of a
once soaring sperm whale.  A fucking sperm whale. Can you believe it?
What an enterprise! Do you know what can stop a sperm whale, bring it to its
knees?

PERCY
Hunger.

EARL
Don't be crass. Nothing can stop a sperm whale, they are beyond collapse
(though you'd be inclined to think otherwise)... Sperm whales move according
to their own liking, they cease when they want to. Only a deus ex
machina can stop one.

Pause. Earl is pleased by her words. Percy scoffs.

EARL
The point is... this is the sunken Babylon of corpses. These are immortal
ruins we plunder. They once fed peoples of all kinds. I remember never
seeing so many different faces, the air never felt so warm. The voices of
each and all rang like an infinite symphony. I wish I could pick each staff,
all of them ripe and new like virgin masks... Oh, I could tell you stories.

PERCY
Stories?

EARL
Any kind of story you want. Funny, up-lifting... dirty... I even got
a few songs with exact words and meter. You tell me what you want to hear.

PERCY
Just tell me the first thing that comes to mind.

EARL
Aren't you accommodating? ...I remember being among a group of vampirefish,
the harmless kind... and if you know vampirefish, you'll know that they are
only harmless when they get too caught up with their own image... So we were
all hanging out and the vampirefish wouldn't shut up about how great times
were. They were making a killing (you'd see chunks of flesh float around
like hot-air balloons, this was a fatty land)... And they would talk about
how happy they were and how cute and well fed they looked-

PERCY
Cute?

EARL
What-?

PERCY
You said "cute".

EARL
Yeah, that's what the vampirefish were saying. I wouldn't said anything like
that myself.

PERCY
Oh?

EARL
But these vampirefish were the harmless kind, and you can tell because they
are too caught up in themselves.

PERCY
You've already said that.

EARL
What? No-

PERCY
You've got your lines wrong.

EARL
What?

PERCY
You botched your lines.

EARL
I did not. I'm doing fine.

PERCY
Yes you did. You got the words wrong.

EARL
You're just desperate for a little get-back aren't you? It sure shows, you
should have your zingers wait for a moment that makes some sort of
sense.

PERCY
But it does make sense, it was quite a simple chain of actions. First you
said the wrong words, then, aware of your mistake, you try to compensate,
which leads you to repeat a previous line completely out of context.

EARL
And how do you know they were the wrong words? Did someone sing you the
right ones?

PERCY
It's in the script.

Percy takes out the play's script and hands it to Earl. She flips to the
right page and reads it. Percy paces behind her.

PERCY
You were just saying how the vampirefish spoke of "how happy they were and
how cute and well fed they looked". In the play, that phrase should have
read "how happy they were and how sexy they looked" (Percy points it out
to Earl). You said the wrong words... and you can see that you fucked up
the lines following that too. You're lucky I only started correcting you
now.

EARL
What? (She begins searching the beginning of the play, as she skims
furiously, Percy leaves unnoticed. Her body language suggests that she
realizes where she made mistakes and their magnitude. After a bit she looks
away from the script) ... You know what? Who fucking cares? What are you
trying to prove? 

Earl turns around and sees no one. She looks at the end of the play.

EARL
So that's it? That's how...? 

Pause. She crumbles the play and throws it down.

Well, I'm sure as hell not done... I've got stories. Real stories... Like
that one about the vampirefish, those fucking parasites. You can say what
you want about us spider crabs. We're scavangers, sure. But we know the end
when we see it. Seeing ends is probably the only damned thing we see in this
hole...

Pause

But that counts for something doesn't it? Not even a sperm whale can say
that about itself. To see an end is to accept it. Sperm whales accept
nothing... Whether they're soaring of sinking... Shit, even after they have
sunk... that's the real "kingdom comes", that's what we're living off of.
Sucking the remnants dry...

Pause. She pecks and examines the morsel

Even this here fortress will be stripped bare... Down to the polished bones
for these senseless currents to gather and smooth out...

She eats the morsel

This abyss will run out one day. I can almost see it.

END

Right now, American political discourse is enjoying some sort of metaphysical afterlife along with God and Punk. It’s been dead for quite some time now, but only in this current election has the stench become so obvious. Much can be said about how mass media (I won’t say bourgeois media) has transformed (I won’t say eviscerated) political discourse, in terms of how it is owned and funded by the capitalist class, or how it forces passive consumption of news and issues, or how it limits debate within ideological boundaries, or how it has privatized a traditionally public sphere of debate, yada yada… but this is a whole other story.

I started writing this post because I hate the feeling I get after watching election debates. There is an overwhelming sense of futility in paying attention to the debate itself because, ultimately, the quality of the arguments don’t matter. This is why I’ve been drinking straight Jack during the debates. It’s not about who wins the debate, but who wins the American Idol performance contest. The debates are more of a casting call. In the same way, voters don’t elect a person for president, but the image of a person. What interested me is how now, more than ever, the language of a candidate’s debate performance is informed by the debate’s visual medium of presentation. The performance game is becoming more like a screen test. Take the Vice Presidential debate, which many have called a “stalemate”, even though Sarah Palin barely managed to deliver completely unrelated memorized tidbits in response to Biden’s charges. Rhetorically, it was quite an absurd event. But those conservative people reacted to her, because she actually spoke to the American people. Unlike Biden, who looked at his opponent or the moderator, Palin had her eyes right on the Camera. She smiled and winked. It was like watching an infomercial… and we know how infomercials can convince us to buy just about anything. In that sense, Palin’s screen language was successful, she was a trained beauty queen.

So what about yesterday’s debate between Obama and McCain? I venture to say that Obama outperformed McCain during the screen tests. Whenever Obama watched McCain answer a question, he reminded me of this video of Frank Sinatra and Tom Jobim:

I was struck by Frank Sinatra’s body language: how he fondles a cigarette, leans back on his chair, smokes, and opens his chest with nonchalance. Meanwhile, Tom Jobim, leaning over his guitar, strums the songs he composed, humming and and singing in portuguese while Sinatra takes a drag of his cigarette. Although Sinatra provided the face, the voice, and the image; Jobim was the engine, well attuned to Sinatra’s nicotine rhythm. Take a look at these two-shots of Barack during last night’s debate:

I would say that Obama embodied both Sinatra and Jobim, both the cool and the rhythm. Obama attentively watched and smiled, but he didn’t lean back on his chair as the smug Sinatra did, he was poised for attack, ready to jump in. McCain on the otherhand, scuttled around, scribbled, fidgeted and compressed his face. Look at the two-shots in the video below:

Compared to Obama’s height advantage and more youthful fluidness, McCain appears more like an angry troll. His referring to Obama as “that one” was so poorly delivered, that McCain came off as a petulant teenager. To top things off, the debate ended with McCain leaving an Obama handshake hanging center screen.

So what does this reading amount to? Not much. This debate can only help Obama’s rise in national and state polls. Voting in the US has devolved into a choice between brand names instead of policy positions, too many voters relate to candidates as abstracted images of themselves, in the same way consumers choose designer labels to complement their self-image. At least, my reading attaches some semblance of a methodology in assessing these image-people. Which may be enough to calm my earlier frustration and occupy me until the Jack drains away.

- s

Many visitors liken São Paulo to an organism, with its cinder and cement follicles and thick avenues pumping grit, labor and oil. They call it a city of indigestion. But I disagree with that metaphor, for its notion of specificity, of traceable limits. São Paulo is more like a metaphysical trick, a cinematic trick, in which all its images are strikingly similar and unmistakably unique. Its streets branch randomly –almost absurdly— in nervous patterns, so that the routes in between images, its guiding algorithms, coalesce in my mind as dreams do.

And what are the textures of such dreams? The dusty pallor of concrete laid flat against the grey-blue-yellow sky opaque like construction paper… the murky rivers soaking up tattered metallurgical hopes, chemical memories, the heavy consciences of industry… the hues of dilapidation, rotting tiles, human mold, and the sweat of modernization: the marbled shanty skins of the outskirts… the collage of cars, their European visages and monogamous colors, under languishing traffic lights, and delivery boys on cheap Japanese motor bikes weaving through automotive fabric, buzzing like infernal wasps… the facades of bakeries, shops, and boutiques arranged as delicate elements in a composition… I remember all these images and their subtitles, air sprayed on the margins of edifices, sometimes even speaking the language of commercials.

I remember the flux of people, day laborers, executives, children selling peanuts at intersections, young girls in shopping centers, old women browsing fruit markets, football games in courtyards, tumultuous bars and restaurants, and the over-arching dissonance of sighs and voices seeking respite… it was night, cool and crisp. I saw the trail of street lights curve down a hill like an elegant glowing necklace. I remember meeting a girl whose eyes were faded green like frozen grass and vibrant yellow like the bands of a yellow jacket. Her name was Patricia, every Wednesday she walked to an evangelical church to pick up a free basket of provisions for her two parents, four brothers, two sisters and three grandparents. I remember how my ears swelled, my eyes burned and reddened, and my throat inflated like a phlegmatic balloon.

“That’s not change, that’s just calling some of the same something different. But you know, you can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.”

- Democratic Presidential Nominee, Barack Obama

These comments by the Illinois Senator set liberals a’clappin and the McCain Campaign a’cryin “Sexism”, “Sarah Palin ain’t no piggie!”. Of course, the bourgeois media quickly took up this vapid discourse, even though Barack was talking about the McCain campaign, and the Republican nominee himself said the same thing about Hillary Clinton’s health care proposals. But is that quote actually calling Sarah Palin a pig, in light of her RNC speech?

As I wrote in my last post, the humor of Sarah Palin’s “lipstick” joke revolves around implying sameness through a superficial non-difference. In the case of the joke, the non-difference and the punchline was “lipstick”. Considering the structure of Sarah Palin’s joke, the signifiers of “Sarah Palin” were the words “Hockey Mom” and “Pitbull”. The “lipstick” was merely the non-differentiating agent, and Palin’s joke in no way implies that lipstick is unique and essential to either Hockey Moms or Pitbulls. Therefore, the notion that Sarah Palin was called a pig is utterly false. If that notion were true, that would also imply that anything wearing lipstick is Sarah Palin: Vultures, Rabbits, Shirt Collars, Tetris, Tugboats, etc.

If anything, Obama’s quip reinforces the idea of sameness that Palin was coyly pushing. In that case, any equivalence between the two jokes lies in their rhetorical usage rather than their signifiers. Obama’s quote is a scathing critique of Sarah Palin’s rhetoric, jabbing at the pretention of differentation. Even if you are convinced that the Obama quote referred to the Sarah Palin identity (although the context implicates the McCain Campaign’s borrowing of the “change” motif), Obama wasn’t saying “Sarah Palin is a pig”, but rather “Sarah Palin is full of shit”.

- s

“You know what they say is the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.”

- Republican Vice-Presidential Nominee Sarah Palin

This unscripted quip by the Alaska Gov’ner and VP Nom drew cheers at the RNC and punning headlines all throughout the media. Not that I’m one to take anything a politician says seriously, but this impromptu joke is worth some critical assessment, not because I’m trying to prove anything about Sarah Palin, but because I think the joke isn’t funny.

Let’s begin with the speaker. I imagine that Sarah Palin was looking to bolster her own aggressiveness within the context of maternal responsibility, more vulgarly, she was going for the “I’m a hot bitch and a small town mom at the same time” impression. What better way to do this, than witha a punchline? Within the context of the speech, the joke came as she was transitioning from the nowhere USA working class credentials, to the political resume. She wanted to spice it up with the notion that the fight (rather than the flight) is essential to her.

The humor of the joke lies in paradox between the superficiality and uniqueness of the stated difference. Because the joke is all about “differences”, the sameness that it actually conveys becomes masked. Sarah Palin was just a shade of grey away from saying “Mothers are bitches”. The phrasing of the joke seeks to shift the responsibility of the content away from the speaker with a downright sophism, hence the “they say”. Sarah Palin doesn’t actually say “mothers are bitches” (although she does), they do. The anonymity of the source is as much a projection of self as it is an affirmation of content.

Then there are the terms chosen:

“Hockey Mom” - a media-fabricated label for white bourgeois women. According to Slate, the median income for Hockey Moms is around twice the national average. On the “Mom” scale, being a soccer mom is a step below, since youth soccer leagues tend to be cheaper and filled with minorities of all shapes and smells.

“Pit bull” - a domesticated dog that’s a breed of a bulldog and a terrier. Since they are tough, sturdy dogs, they have been used for ranching, hunting, rescuing, as well as cocaine sniffing. Pit bull’s have recently gotten bad press, they are used in illegal dog-fights and have been known to kill babies. Wikipedia states that “with guidance from its handlers, [Pit bulls] are obedient and show a high desire to please. However, when left without direction they can become stubborn and may become aggressive”.

“Lipstick” - although it’s been around since ancient Mesopotamia, most people associate lipstick with its modern form, that is, as a commodity that enhances superficial appearances.

Given Palin’s motivation, these qualifiers are rather odd. First, there is the choice of “Hockey Mom” rather than “Mom” (a term that’s profoundly universal). A Black mother of two in Alabama and a Orthodox Jewish mother of eight in Williamstown don’t fit the qualifier, unless their kids play hockey. They are excluded from this representation of toughness, determination, etc. Then there is the “Pit bull”… Sure, people think pit bulls are “badass” or whatever, but they are domesticated animals designed to be subservient to their masters. That Sarah Palin chose a small domesticated animal over a wild one (Bear! Tiger! Penguin!) is telling. It’s also interesting that Pitbulls aren’t even a pure breed, they are a cross. They bear the indignity of design (essence preceding existence). Finally, there’s the “lipstick” punchline. Considering the mechanism of the joke, “lipstick” carries the weight of “the difference” between white woman and domesticated animal. It’s interesting that she chose “lipstick”, a symbol for female superficiality, a commodity fetish. For the punchline, Sarah Palin could have pointed to her breasts and said “these” (although she was at the RNC), or she could have said “chap stick” (a more poetic choice), or “birth control” (but she’s evangelical), or any number of things… So what does this all add up to?

“You know what they say is the difference between a bourgeois white mother and a domesticated animal? Lipstick.”

Probably the reason why I didn’t care for the joke isn’t that Sarah Palin says she’s a bitch, but that she’s someone’s bitch. She manages to convey both bourgeois entitlement and a dehumanized submission. All with reductive and dehumanizing qualifiers. The way the media is treating Sarah Palin, and it’s own sexist treatments is an issue unto itself. What bothers me about Sarah Palin isn’t that she’s a religious conservative, or that she’s inexperienced or slightly fascist, or that I would rather die than have her as my mother… She’s bound to the paradox of a woman with a pregnant teenage daughter who flies around with a special-needs baby about to be born and returns to work three days after its birth, that’s to say, a woman who forsakes being a human mother to being a political mother… Surely, she’s entitled to seek political office while raising five kids (more power to her!). She also happens to think that she’s entitled to everyone’s reproductive rights and to ban books, but that’s another matter… What bother’s me about Sarah Palin is that she seems to be nothing more than strategic advertisement for the McCain campaign, down to the Juno-esque pregnancy and the snowmobile racing husband. She chose to become an image, a commercial. You can argue the same for Barack Obama, although I find him a much more compelling image because of its historical implications.

If Sarah Palin had been a reincarnation of Descartes, she would have probably said:

“You know what they say is the difference between a bourgeois white mother and a domesticated animal? Reason.”

Whether she wanted to or not, Sarah Palin touched on an essential question. What separates us from animals? This summer, I read “The Lives of Animals” by J.M. Coetzee. In it, a fictional character named Elizabeth Costello gives a rather radical lecture about animal rights at a university. What interested me most about her arguments was the refutation of the Cartesian argument that reason separates us from animals. This notion of reason is unprovable. Testing the “intelligence” of animals with mazes and puzzles, only forces them to think the basic thoughts we want them to, such as “how the fuck do i get to my food?”. A more essential thought would be “why am I here?”, “why has this scientist taken me from my home?” or “how do I make him return me to my home?”, which is harder to prove, if at all possible (Kafka wrote a great short story about this). It’s just an absurd methodology as if we threw people in a jungle and see how well they “reasoned” things out. That we are different from animals is so obvious to us, yet so hard to pinpoint. A classical Marxist would say that Sarah Palin’s joke has truth to it, if it’s spun properly. That is, if “lipstick” were taken to mean a totality of social processes rather than a fetish. Marx believed that the difference between us and animals was in the fact that animals at most collect while men produce. While, I think this thought goes in a good direction, it’s not an entirely satisfying answer… What about language? Or society? How would this be tested given the complex and variable relationship between self and environment…

I digress… all this for a joke? you may ask. It’s only a fucking joke!

Yeah… i guess.

- s

There is much talk within film scholarship about the complicit passivity of audiences… Complicit in that the audience’s eyes aligns with the camera’s gaze, and passive in that the alignment (the images on the screen) and its direction doesn’t at all care for the audience’s agency. In a sense, watching a film is like stepping into a different world -or better yet, like taking a guided tour of another world. Stanley Cavell talks about how there is a moment of awakening after a movie ends, the audiences realigns with reality. Walter Benjamin likens the aesthetic experience of film to that of architecture. While it seems that film theorists like to talk about the passive audience as if it’s a “film thing”, something similar can be said about audiences at a classical music concert (just try coughing during one!) or even at a play. The big danger with this whole logic, is when it begins assuming that observers are essentially passive. Such an assumption belies a Eurocentric tradition of a non-participatory audience, where they can aspire to be, at most, loud tomato-throwing critics without any bearing on the course of what they are observing. In all this, different traditions are obscured. A notable exception to this entire passive audience talk is “the Maccabean Theater”.

The Maccabees were a Jewish fundamentalist terrorist organization seeking to liberate the holy land from the foreign occupation of the Greek empire-state (well, the Seleucid Dynasty). They were ultimately successful and today they are mostly known for two Apocryphal books and a surprisingly effective energy sustainability policy (even though they blew all the energy saved on a party). Little is known about “the Maccabean Theater”, probably because it wasn’t an actual theater. The Maccabean Revolt was as much of a struggle against an occupying empire as it was a civil war between Jewish Nationalist and Jewish Hellenists. Violence against the Hellenists was widespread, it was so common that it gave birth to a curious tradition. Maccabean fighters began rounding up Hellenists on an elevated platform, forcing them to act out their profane gentile rituals, utter prayers, and prepare offerings. As the captive Hellenists acted as they were told to, the Maccabees would shoot arrows and throw spears at the actors. Some would even rush up to the platform, bloodthirsty sword in hand. These performance ritual were also cleansing rituals, fervent homages to the High Priest Phineas (Pinchas). They grew in popularity and became more and more elaborate. The forced reenactment of rituals evolved into the forced reenactment of histories and mythologies. Thus was the “Maccabean Theater” born, a theater of sentencing, a theater of judgment and execution.

Unlike the Roman gladiators, who were mere spectacles, the Maccabean Theater reached a brief peak before the newly liberated Jewish theocracy ushered its decline. None exemplified the apex of the Maccabean Theater better than Zedekiah the Danite. While many question the historicity of Zedekiah, reasoning that he represented a small amorphous collective movement, his projects sought to elevate the performance purges to a different level. Zedekiah often crafted his own reenactments, binary morality tales based on Jewish struggles. He created a reenactment of Book of Esther where all the captives played Haman. There’s evidence that suggests that Zedekiah even trained some captives to act, as the more capable actors were often killed last to greater general enthusiasm. Zedekiah reasoned, that if the audience were to play G-d’s will and punishment, the reenactments shouldn’t simply be some glorified shooting gallery. There must be a dynamic between the audience and the actors. So Zedekiah the Danite began toying with sympathetic gentile characters (how much longer will the divine arm let this sinner live?), but then he wanted to take a step further. He imagined an opulent Passover pageant, in which the story would change according to the death of each captive. This task was harder than imagined, since a vast array of plot permutations had to be planned and rehearsed. Zedekiah would have also required captives with significant acting experiences, capable of memorizing all possible outcomes and improvising smooth transitions, as a captive never really knew when the “Will of G-d” would smite again. The historical record doesn’t indicate whether Zedekiah’s plans ever came to fruition, although it’s said that one time, as a big finger to Hellenic culture, Zedekiah staged a minor comedy by Menander.

With the liberated Jewish state and the decline of heretical crimes, the Maccabean Theater became less about killing the actors and more about letting the better actors live. Crowds began sparing the better performers before killing off the inferior ones. Once the Romans took over, even the hands-on killing started to cease, as the Roman state usurped the state’s judicial power of execution, and death by stoning made a rollicking comeback among smaller religious courts. By then, the performance rituals forsook plots and stories, to become a kind of holiday variety show, where the most popular captive criminal act would be spared execution. Such was the case when Jesus Christ competed against Barabbas one Passover morning (a detail the gospels poorly address). By choosing a majestic silence over the actor’s craft, Jesus was promptly dispatched to the nailing yard, while the thief Barabbas was set free (according to Luke, Barabbas beat out not only Jesus but two others).

While largely forgotten, the Maccabean Theater of Judgment does have some spiritual children of sorts. The concept of torture as theater is probably more common than it’s been in awhile, thanks mostly to the Bush administration, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay. It’s in no way limited to post-9/11 politics. Take, for example, the shitty Korean movie Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, or Jean-Pierre Meville’s 1969 masterpiece Army of Shadows. But I think what best inherits the tradition of the Maccabean God-audience is the current fad of judge based reality TV shows, such as American Idol, or the one with the fashion designing cooks. The audience retains a faint semblance of Maccabean empowerment. The leap from Zedekiah the Danite to American Idol is certainly long, but as any good Czarist would attest: the Jews own the media.

- s

…

sitting by the shore,
a generic fisherman
craves a cigarette

..

three splashing children
reinvent themselves as shapes
they once saw on screen

..

a mother, reading
paperback, anticipates
the next rendezvous

..

a boy, eyes grinning,
unwraps a milky way bar
- first time shoplifting

..

watching other kids
play, a lone girl swears to guard
the secret of eels

..

lovers in the shade
make up names for babies
they would never have

..

“What democracy?”
a man points and demands, as
his audience yawns

..

on the grass, a stoned
poet writes the tragedy
that all ice cubes share

..

a pensive woman
counts dragonflies, tracing the
limits of language

..

an old man, strolling,
recalls a Greek bakery
with last night’s hunger

..

students picnic, pour
boxed wine into plastic cups.
laughing, they forget

..

among the bushes,
an exuberant jimmy
urinates proudly

..

a tanned vagabond
ties down his whimpering dog
then goes for a dip

..

the water report:
pH slightly alkaline
with traces of lead

..

overlooking the
lake, she informs me: no one
can see us at all

…

Everyone just loves the new Batman movie. After only two weekends in theaters, The Dark Knight is the #1 movie of all time according to imdb members. Critics have been gushing with glowing reviews (though the New Yorker or A.O. Scott beg to differ). The movie’s success is evident, it is the fastest to gross over $300 million domestically. Heath Ledger is even generating Oscar buzz… but with all the hype aside, the best I can say of The Dark Knight is that it’s a “superior superhero movie”, which is pretentious-filmspeak for “the hype’s total bullshit”.

The “superior superhero movie” qualifier should be elaborated. The Dark Knight features a very competent cast with a remarkable Heath Ledger to go along with a cool chase, some neat cat-and-mouse scenes, and some Stygian Gotham atmospherics. Seeing it on an IMAX screen is definitely and all-encompassing (and loud) experience. What’s interesting about Dark Knight (and what everyone fawns over) is how it questions the superhero genre itself within a “post 9/11″ context. But that’s all it does. It questions and questions and questions as loudly and succinctly at every possible moment. Writers Cristopher and Jonathan Nolan bring up just about every liberal post 9/11 talking point: Torture! Wiretapping! Due Process! Just let the Joker make a phone call! All of this makes for a story that’s richer than usual. Only all these hot-button topics dissipate as Batman does what the genre invariably tells him to do.

The dissipation problem is more than thematic. The movie frantically weaves in and out of scene without giving each a sense of cohesion or closure. As a result, scenes with dramatic potential get the same slap and dash treatment as unnecessary exposition. There’s an entirely absurd Hong-Kong mission where Batman comes off like some glorified American James Bond. In spite of all the razzle dazzle, the final confrontation between Batman and Joker reminded me of a time I went flaccid during intercourse. You’d imagine that a $185 million dollar budget would afford some script editors… But no… Even Two-Face’s little coin flipping trick is a pallid replica of Anton Chiguhr’s.

I have always had issues with superhero movies. I just can’t accept a superhero world and the myth of exceptionalism that the genre bases itself on. In the proud American tradition, the superhero world presupposes a simple good versus evil polarity, which The Dark Knight questions without betraying the assumption. The superhero itself is equally problematic. A superhero is the sublimation of the human entity into a weapon, into an instrument of order and security. The apotheosis of the superhero requires that the individual leave behind his real identity in order to become an abstracted citizen, a symbol of a man, an image (The Dark Knight uses all the batman imitators to briefly toy with this idea). As a symbol, the superhero is essentially a fetishism. In the case of Bruce Wayne, whose “superpower” is his wealth, he spins amazing technologies out of thin air, a batmobile here, a wire-tapping infrastructure there… as if Batman and Lucius Fox built it all themselves. No one expects a superhero movie to discuss labor. After all, the superhero must be divorced from his material reality to be super. Such distinction is clearly only allotted to the exceptional, while all other hard-working citizens must depend on this symbolic exception.

Just as Batman is a symbol, so is the Joker. They mirror each other (another idea that the movie brings up to little consequence). That the Joker is the most compelling character in The Dark Knight attests both to an incredible performance by Heath Ledger and to the staleness of the other “human” characters. The Joker is a non-entity. Unlike Batman, he has no human context, no mask, only a grotesquely painted facade, making his unmotivated acts of destruction all the more palatable for its symbolism. The Dark Knight becomes the Joker’s movie. He gives the best lines, diabolically catalyzes most of the action, and brings Batman’s entire moral universe into question. Is Batman doing more harm than good? Has he brought Gotham down a road of no return? Perhaps this will be answered in the third installment. But by the end of The Dark Knight, even the Joker becomes problematic.

The problem is not that the Joker’s acts of destruction are a symbolic challenge, but that the movie insists that the Joker is a terrorist… After the movie, I remembered Baudrillard’s “The Spirit of Terrorism”:

This is the spirit of terrorism. Never is it to attack the system through power relations. This belongs to the revolutionary imaginary imposed by the system itself, which survives by ceaselessly bringing those who oppose it to fight in the domain of the real, which is always its own. But (it) moves the fight into the symbolic domain, where the rule is the rule of challenge, of reversal, of escalation. Thus, death can be answered only though an equal or superior death. Terrorism challenges the system by a gift that the latter can reciprocate only through its own death and its own collapse.

As exceptional symbols, both Batman and the Joker enjoy a quasi-omnipresence and an unlimited supply of resources. Although Batman has everything money can build at his disposal, the Joker uses real, functional structures (the domain of labor). In using these structures, the Joker becomes a truck driver, a nurse, a soldier -and always a terrorist. Therefore the Joker, the symbol of unmotivated chaos, the non-entity, is also the symbol of terrorism. And as such a symbol, terrorism becomes depoliticized, it is no longer a reaction against the dominant order or calculated political violence. It is reduced to being evil, to being the unreasonable and unmotivated desire “to watch the world burn”, and to being only vincible with weapons or superheroes.

This new batman movie posits fundamental questions about itself, and for a second, the entire superhero framework appears absurd. But that’s only for a second. Maybe these limitations are placed by the genre. How much of Batman would the studio’s allow to be deconstructed, torn from its roots and set on fire?If I ever decide to make my own superhero movie, I want to create a dashing hero experiencing all sorts of superhero adventures, blowing all sorts of shit up… there’ll be chaos and destruction… but at the end, the superhero confronts an angry mass… guerrillas? workers? students? only to be swarmed and killed, dismembered, torn apart. The antithesis of the American-brand exceptionalism: the “super power” of the collective.

- s

Fassbinder’s fabulous 1981 film “Lola“, tells the story of a small town singer/hooker (Fassbinder lifted the premise from “The Blue Angel” starring Marlene Dietrich), who goes after a reserved and untainted building commissioner after a corrupt contractor (and lover) remarks that the new commissioner is “no man for her”. By seducing the commissioner, Lola is reacting against social exclusion and oppression by seeking to affirm her “true value” through the melodramatic vehicle of “true love”. Granted, Lola and the commissioner fall in love and get married, but Fassbinder is perverse at heart. During the last scenes, the corrupt contractor buys a short honeymoon with the freshly married Lola by giving her the whorehouse she worked in as a wedding present. “You’re an expensive mistress”, the contractor quips. “That’s how it should be”, retorts Lola.

The big irony of the film is that Lola’s successful quest to reaffirm her worth amounts to a mere increase in exchange value. Lola just became more expensive, that is her empowerment.

In the new issue of “American Scholar”, former Yale English Prof. William Deresiewicz presents a stinging and insightful critique of the elite Ivy League education system and how it breeds an upper crust mentality of exceptionalism and entitlement. On the one hand, Deresiewicz laments a system which he calls “anti-intellectual” for pushing normative ideas of intelligence, work, and society, while eschewing independent intellectual development and individual choice. Being smart isn’t the same as being intellectual.

When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. [...] We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

On the other hand, Deresiewicz believes the self-congratulatory bubble of elite institutions is a reflection of American socio-economic conditions. How different is the atmosphere of grade-inflation, extensions, and constant counseling at elite institutions to the padded lives of the wealthy, where they can always count on family money, connections, rehab and spiritual voyages to India to get themselves together? Meanwhile, public universities are entrenched with rigid bureaucracies and inflexible technocrats…

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point.

Deresiewicz’s disenchantment is summarized in the following quote:

But I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.

But how inextricable is education from “the class system”? Is it that surprising that a school such as Amherst or Yale, whose endowment is funded by capitalists, would seek to train future investment bankers and politicians? Perhaps this disenchantment comes from the expectation that an “elite” institution should be mass producing young Darwins and Marxes and Sartres, but even such expectation presupposes that educational institutions are essentially social factories. As Baudrillard put it, an educational system aims “at remodeling an ideal nature from a child”. What “ideal nature” exists that isn’t defined by a dominant paradigm?

As resounding as Deresiewicz social-economic commentary is, he speaks of the class difference between elite institutions and public universities only in terms of their differences, as if an i-banker from Amherst working 80 hours a week for Bear Stearns isn’t stuck in a life of subordination, supervision, and deadlines. Classes are separated by their position relative to the means of production, not simply by annual income. Chris Rock once joked, “Shaq is rich, but the white guy who writes his check is wealthy“; while elite institutions are spawning the ruling class of tomorrow, that can’t be said for all of us. A diploma from Amherst isn’t an automatic ticket to upper-classdom, we’re still expected to sell our labor just like a middle-manager from Ohio State or a factory worker in Sri Lanka. This idea of a meritocracy espoused by “the elite” is an illusion at worse, a petty reward at best… A notch up on the ol’ rope… Exploit yourself so that you one day can exploit others. What empowerment then does an elite institution give us? Ask Lola. It just makes us more expensive.

- s