Too Much, Too Little, Too Slate

Last night I saw The Dark Knight Rises on pay-per-view, and I have to say it was a depressing, oddly unspectacular spectacle of a movie.  Too long, too precious with its own sense of sociological importance, and way too dark.  Too "dark" in the sense that the cinematographer took The Godfather movies way too seriously, and too "dark" in the sense that the director and screen-writers took the comic-book mythology, and themselves, way too seriously.  The movie indulges in a kind of Call of Duty: Black Ops campiness in which tragedy becomes a sordid byproduct of machine-guns and stupid costumes.  Throw in a little Dickensian pathos (orphaned boys in the sewers) and a little Dictatorship of the Proletariat doing the halftime show at the Superbowl and there you have it:  too much, too little, too slate.

All kinds of attempts are made at emotional resonance, but in the end it's just what it is:  a slow-paced, self-indulgent paean to self-indulgence.  And Christian Bale really is the centerpiece of that self-involved sensibility.  When he's not in the Batman get-up he's doing a self-pitying tango with his grown-in-isolation goatee, and when he's in the Batman get-up his voice goes into a chainsaw hyper-masculine contralto that has the humorous suspiciousness of a little kid trying to sound like a big kid.  Anne Hathaway tries her best as the Catwoman, and god love her she seems to be the only soul this movie has.  She plays it for laughs at times, but also seems to get that the seriousness can be used to good effect when you're not pouting and posing all the time.

The whole creepy enterprise is haunted by what happened in Aurora, Colorado of course.  That adds to the strange stupidity of it all, especially when channeled through the arch villain Bane, a Darth-Vader-masked big-mouthed Anglophile thug who spouts Marxist/Leninist bull shit, and who delights in being "eveeeel."

By the end I felt sick and tired of being sick and tired.  All that effort just to make the world seem worse than it is, so a bunch of dumbasses in kinky black outfits can ride around in souped-up helicopters and tanks blasting away at fake concrete buildings. 

At least The Avengers had a sense of humor and proportion.  A little old-fashioned self-consciousness goes a long way.

New Ghost Freeway

I just posted this on the Raymond Thunder-Sky blog I manage  (www.raymondthundersky.org):

In October, we asked a few Thunder-Sky fans to come together to help us envision the future for the joint.   One image we all kept coming back to is the wrecking ball.   Many times organizations built to help/support non-traditional, unconventional, just plain weird people end up monuments to the status quo.  One thing we want to ensure with this gig: we always think beyond a building, and we always keep Raymond’s transience and weirdness at the center of our decision-making process.

We are going into the fourth year of Thunder-Sky, Inc., and I guess I could list accomplishments (I have on Facebook and other places), but really what I want to do is theorize a way to be productive and organized without being an Organization.  We're a non-profit, have our 501c3 and all that, in place.  We have a small board and advisory board, but I have intentionally kept all of this as informal as possible so that all the organizational stuff does not infringe on the reason we're doing what we're  doing.  Thunder-Sky, Inc. is an open book, funded mostly through art sales and donations.  We haven't really pursued grants because again I don't want grant proposals to infringe on the reason we're doing what we're doing.  We have not hired anyone to do anything.  We just keep on doing what we do.

For what reason?

To create a gallery/museum/studio/organization/whatever that never becomes an institution of any kind.  "Institution," of course, is a very loaded word.  So let's just get right down to it.  Here's the cold, hard Webster definition:

/ˌɪn institution [in-sti-too-shuh n, -tyoo-]  noun

1.  an organization, establishment, foundation, society, or the like, devoted to the promotion of a particular cause or program, especially one of a public, educational, or charitable character: This college is the best institution of its kind. 

2. the building devoted to such work.

3. a public or private place for the care or confinement of inmates, especially mental patients or other disabled or handicapped persons.

4. Sociology . a well-established and structured pattern of behavior or of relationships that is accepted as a fundamental part of a culture, as marriage: the institution of the family.

The essence of all these definitions is particularity, devotion, confinement, and structure.  I think we have the particularity and devotion covered; it's the other two that kind of complicate things.  Raymond's nature confounded and perturbed:  he was devoted to escaping confinements of all kinds, and as far as structures, he advocated in almost ever drawing he did the demolition of structures that were often mainstays of culture and society.  Prisons, schools, hospitals, and nursing homes were always on his wrecking-ball's radar.  He seemed to find immense joy in destroying what had taken often decades, maybe even centuries, to construct.  One bold whack of the wrecking-ball, and it's all gone, only to be replaced by what can never really be there:  a card-trick clown-suit factory here, a new ghost freeway there.

Raymond's imagination, in other words, delighted in destruction and disorganization.  And in order to build an organization that is inspired by that chaotic bliss, we need to take into account every step we make organizationally.

This is not an easy sale, of course, in the conventional sense of fundraising, board-building, etc.  It's kind of like a parody of it.

So we try to keep everything as simple as possible.  Small board, no paid staff, a little space, six shows a year, a few shows outside of the space we're in, a Saturday art-making workshop for whoever shows up...

As we try to establish this kind of disorganization/organization, paradoxically building a future for it, we're going to need people on board with us who can bifurcate their thinking, redefine what they think an organization is supposed to be and do, and also perhaps understand the unnerving power of transience.  Raymond was always on the move.  Although he was never homeless, he was always searching for a place to be aesthetically, maybe even spiritually.  He rode the public bus and walked city streets in the hunt of it, always dressed in his scary/sweet clown/construction-worker drag.  His presence often bewildered, and even sometimes agitated, fellow travelers.  He got beat up at times for being that figure.  He probably got used to suspicious stares.  But he knew in his heart that he had to get somewhere.

Can we build an organization based on that disarming impermanence?

I guess we'll see...

In October, we had eight like-minded individuals come together and seem to think that we can.  In February we're going to try another round of brainstorming on the subject...  On Raymond's birthday, February.  Freaks welcome.

Fart Jokes

I stumbled across The Nutty Professor this week -- the one with Eddie Murphy as a morbidly obese professor who through a labratory mistake turns into a sleek lounge-lizard, a remake of the Jerry Lewis gig.  The center of this daisy though is The Klumps, who would earn top billing in the sequel a couple years later (the one with Janet Jackson in it).  The Klumps make their debut at the dinner table, and it is a tour-deforce, each member of the clan given specific personalities, voices, the works by Murphy the Master Mocker.  But Murphy's performances in this scene, as Papa and Mama Klump, Grandma Klump and Big Bad Brother Klump (with Nephew Klump played by a child actor), are the only soul in an otherwise clunky, soulless movie.  It's kind of like Murphy riffing on The Carol Burnett Show's Family skit, with Burnett as Eunice, and Vickie Lawrence as Mama.  The pleasure of seeing families burlesqued like this is that while the humor is broad and crude it makes you also realize how life is just like that:  broad and crude and stupid and more often than not funny. 

The funniest part of the Klump's dinnertime episode comes from farting.

Papa Klump farts, the Nephew Klump farts, and I think even Grandma Klumps goes at it.  It's a chorus of farts only rivaled by the campfire farting in Blazing Saddles. 

Which brings me to this show we're going to present next year at Thunder-Sky, Inc. It's about farting.  Why?  Because David Jarred and Kenton Brett, two smart and smart-alecky artists, presented the idea to us:  an art exhibit called "The (f)Art Show."  Just like that.  Okay.  Let's do it. 

Farting seems to be both a metaphor and a condition that brings forth laughter and a universal response.  Plus farting and scatology in general are major motifs throughout literature and art -- beyond movies and TV even.  Take for example selected scenes from Aristophanes' The Clouds, Geoffrey Chaucer's The Miller's Tale, Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel, James Joyce's Ulysses, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, and so on.  Or take a look at this:

This is a sculptural work by Chinese artist Chen Wenling, his take on the global financial crisis from 2009.  It was this photo, I think, that might have stirred David and Kenton into action.  Anyway, this is a fart joke on a grand scale, using gas as a way to satirize gas-bags.  The glory of it is its total clarity.  Nothing ambiguous about a fart. 

Or as Dante puts it in his famous Divine Comedy (the last line of Inferno Chapter XXI): "Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta."  Translated:  “And he used his ass as a trumpet.”

Welcome to the Hotel Synesthesia

I'm going to write a lot more about the 21C, the new art-museum/hotel that just opened here in Cincinnati for Aeqai, the online art journal I do some stuff for, but I wanted to just bask in the glow of the initial experience of going there.  We went last Friday night, and the place felt haunted and yet brand new simultaneously, packed with artsy middle aged married couples, many wearing the funky, stylized eye wear of Brooklyn hipsters and/or the funky, stylized scarves of ladies who lunch.  It was like a quiet, orderly carnival, with art everywhere, just everywhere, and people drinking in a plush bar, and the whole universe encapsulated by this European wonderfulness:  a classy hotel. 

Most of the art though is a little too rigidly contemporary and chalky and corporate for my taste.  Still I went through and it was a synesthesic experience:   your senses get overloaded not because there's so much to see, but because someone has taken the time to curate and structure so much art and art-like objects you feel like an art orphan trapped in a beautiful art orphanage.

Or Alice wandering room to room, floor to floor. No Mad Hatters though.  Just those whispering artsy middle aged married couples.

My favorite surprise:  a little boardroom on the second floor, claustrophobic and blond-wood-bureaucratic, with several Kara Walker cutouts beautifully framed and installed on all four walls.  Remember that scene in The Empire Strikes Back?  The one where Lando Calrissian fucks over Han, Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, and C3PO, escorting them to a conference room on Cloud City, and there sits Darth Vader at the breakfast nook?  That's the feeling I got:  a sweet, ironic little shock, Walker's silhouettes providing both respite and a weird, innocent terror.

Myth/Nostalgia/Ache/Absurdity/Beauty

Life of Pi is one of those movies that no longer is a movie in your head after you see it.  It's a pattern of wallpaper from your childhood, a beautiful/horrible incident that you recover from but never get over, a look a school-bus driver gives you in his rear view mirror, a fading sunset in the basement of your best friend's grandma's house after a flood...  In short it's pure poetry with an engine of narrative so efficient you don't feel the story as story, the movie as movie.  You feel the story as myth/nostalgia/ache/absurdity/beauty.  I could go on about how Ang Lee is a genius, about the CGI and the 3D effects, about the brevity and kindness of both the novel and the screenplay...  But I just want to concentrate on the experience of having gone through this "thing."  It's a dream that doesn't linger as much as reverberate, like post traumatic stress disorder. 

And then, toward the end, that tiger Pi loved and needed to love just walking away from him into the darkness of a jungle.  That's wisdom turned inside out, sentiment too.  Nothing means anything, and yet everything is alive with meaning. 

The best movie of the year.

The Imagination Is Not Our Escape

Six Degrees of Separation has been haunting my thoughts since I showed it in a disability studies class I'm teaching about alliances and advocacy involving people with and without disabilities.  I wrote a post about the movie a few weeks ago ("Just Fill in the Names"), but now I've read the papers the students in the class wrote about the movie, and I feel inspired.  While not explicitly about disability, Six Degrees focuses on the complicated and emotional relationships forged when people from completely separate cultural and socioeconomic worlds decide to make an alliance.  It's rough stuff.  In the movie, Paul (Will Smith), the African American, gay, homeless kid starving for upscale approval and connection, and Ouisa (Stockard Channing), the rich socialite who loves him and sees his worth despite the circumstances of their meeting, represent two forces coming together and changing one another in ways they could never have foreseen before their collision.  It's life-changing, for everyone involved.

Here's what some of the students wrote:

From Shelby Stanovsek:

"The main character in this film, Ouisa, works for justice because she is willing to look outside of the boundaries and lines that her class of people creates and is willing to accept someone who was not born into a life of privilege...  In the film it is evident that she has developed a deep emotional bond with Paul, and is proud of the work he has done to better himself.  She does not feel he should be punished for lying about his identity because she knows that had he not constructed a fake story to get into their lives, they never would have allowed him the chance, and I think that she admires his bravery and commitment in that regard."

From Hannah Hampton:

"Regardless of the way Paul has taken advantage of them, they still agree to help him.  This is a true portrayal of an ally -- they overlook Paul's flaws and realize he is just a boy who needs help."

From Caitlin Coholich:

"Six Degrees tells the story of how easily alliances can be made; however it also shows how easily they can vanish."

From Jennifer McMillan:

"Ouisa doesn't fully transcend the boundaries of her upper-class lifestyle until the very end of the movie when she ultimately and fully rejects the society and the imagination-starved life she had been living.  The fact like Paul was black and homeless is perhaps what kept the alliance between Paul and Ouisa alive for as long as it was.  He was the opposite of what she symbolized, and this enabled her to enter an opposite world by connecting to him.  Ouisa was a controlled person before she met Paul.  Paul completely turned Ouisa's life into chaos.  However, chaos is not always a negative experience.  What comes from chaos is often a rebirth, an invigoration."

From Tori Evans:

"Paul stated in the movie, 'The imagination is not our escape.  On the contrary, the imagination is the place we are all trying to get to.'  He wanted people to expand their stereotypes and prejudices and see others not for their color, sexuality or class."

Bondage

Skyfall, the new James Bond film, is exhilarating to watch to the point you forget it's a total retread.  The whole purpose of Bond movies now, of course, is aggrandizing deja vu, finding pleasure in reinventing what has been reinvented to the point it's no longer cliche, just a kind of movie-movie shorthand.  Skyfall is one of the best examples of taking formula and reformulating it to create a little shock to spice up nostalgia.  And its first five or six minutes are probably one of the best action-picture sequences in the history of movies:  car crashes, motorcycles zooming over roofs, a speeding train with two men fighting atop it.  It's an old-school triumph of style over logic.  The ending, as well, has an early-90s independent-movie vibe to go along with its crashing helicopters and armed groups of bald mustached men.  It takes place in a small Scottish church, and delivers a dramatic punch in the gut that evens has tears rolling down 007's cheeks.

Daniel Craig plays Bond as if he is in a trance, all blue-eyed soullessness, his anger engineered to create simple solutions to very complicated problems.  And Judi Dench, as M, is so beautifully understated in her portrayal of power-hunger and regret, she practically steals the show. 

One part of the retread pleasure that doesn't work for me is Javier Bardem's supervillain, Silva.  Bardem is an incredible ham, and it is always a joy to watch him ham it up, but in Skyfall the character does not deserve such deliberation and vigor.  Silva is a one-note psycho, and is particularly sad because of the way the screenwriters define him:  he is disfigured from a botched suicide attempt, and that disfigurement becomes the reason he is what he is, that disability defining him.  He also has dyed blond hair and eyebrows, and a sort of proto-effeminacy that borders on camp:  a guttural, grotesque prissiness that makes it seem like Silva's insatiable villainy is unspooling from Silva's "monstrous" (at least in the moral code of the Bond movies) sexuality.  In one of the first scenes between Bond and Silva, Bardem plays Silva like a catty homo happy to be indulging in a little kink.  With Mr. Bond helpless, strapped to a chair, Silva opens Bond's shirt and licks his lips and it's awkward not because of the gay vibe as much as what the gay vibe is being used for:  to define good and evil.  It's a quick way to divide the universe.

Even when you indulge in retreading a retread after 50 years of service, you still need to rethink the villainy just as much as the heroism.  Isn't there a way to create "evil" without making it feel like gay-bashing?  Can a villain not have a facial disfigurement and still be evil?