The below is a quote from David Denby's review of "Kill Bill" in The New Yorker last October.

'In "Kill Bill," Uma Thurman kills a fellow female warrior in front of the woman's little girl, who stares but utters not a sound. Again, we know the scene is meant as play. The two women have already been fighting in the living room, knocking down furniture and throwing each other about like rag dolls. But where's the joke in this particular unreality? If Tarantino is cutting us off from the real world, why use a child to bring us so perilously back into it? And, if he's bringing us back into it, why not allow the child some expression of fear or grief? Tarantino wants the shock of a mother killed in front of her daughter without the audience undergoing any discomfort at all. "Kill Bill" is what's formally known as decadence and commonly known as crap.'

What David Denby is forgetting is that the daughter of the woman Uma Thurman killed is the daughter of a master assassin. When you are the daughter of a master assassin there are certain rules. One of the first rules is that you must watch your parent(s) get killed in stoic silence. Uma is well aware of this and bothers to tell the child that if the experience has been at all upsetting the child will have every opportunity to return the favor some years down the line. Most people know this about master assassins and being the child of an assassin. Indeed, the same basic scenario is repeated later in the movie during the anime reconstruction of O-Ren Ishii's (Lucy Lui) early childhood. Perhaps Denby was too busy studying pornography on the internet to do the proper research into assassins and their childhoods. Most of us, however, are aware of these rules and would be rather annoyed if the child were to have broken them. Interestingly, Denby is perfectly aware that Tarantino is a strange kind of formalist.

He writes, 'We know that the violence isn't "real," that Tarantino is playing with the conventions of Japanese samurai movies.' It is the "formally" that is crucial in the last sentence. Denby seems to realize that Tarantino is asking the audience to participate in his own version of cinemaphilia but, ultimately, doesn't care.

That's always the problem with formalists, of course. If you haven't already accepted the constraints of their particular form then it leaves you cold. The form, as it were, is always somewhat outside of the real and the everyday. One has to do some work to understand it on its own terms. Minimalism, for instance, isn't very exciting or engaging until one knows something about the history of modern art and the vaguely philosophical problems that led Barnett Newman, for instance, to decide that he would try and capture the very essence of line and surface. Who knows if he did, but it can be pretty exciting once you feel the force of it all. Walking around the Dia Beacon, once you do have some sense of what is going on, can be as exhilarating an experience as seeing Uma Thurman eviscerate and maim all of the members of the Crazy 88. Those still alive, she informs them at one point, are free to leave . . . but they can't take their severed limbs with them. Those she will keep.

To return to Denby, it is precisely this problem of formalism and reality that really concerns him. 'We know that the violence isn't "real,"' he admits. And even more crucially, says that "a filmed image has a stubborn hold on reality. An image of a rose may be filtered, digitally repainted, or pixilated, yet it will still carry the real-world associations - the touch, the smell, the romance - that we have with roses. Tarantino wants us to give up such associations, which means giving up ourselves." Denby is unwilling to give in to the formalism of Tarantino's world. He even equates it with giving up his own identity and the identity of the real world he understands. In the end, all the stuff happening on the screen doesn't hold any meaning for him; he is in a situation where 'I felt nothing - not anger, not dismay, not amusement. Nothing.' And that is what always happens when you come up against a form you aren't willing to inhabit or don't have the tools to enter.

Contrast this with Roger Ebert's impression of the film. Ebert is no less desirous of genuine meaning than Denby, but he is more willing, at least in this case, to do some work with the formalism in order to get it. Ebert writes:

'[Tarantino's] story is a distillation of the universe of martial arts movies, elevated to a trancelike mastery of the material. Tarantino is in the Zone. His story engine is revenge. In the opening scene, Bill kills all of the other members of a bridal party, and leaves The Bride (Uma Thurman) for dead. She survives for years in a coma and is awakened by a mosquito's buzz. Is QT thinking of Emily Dickinson, who heard a fly buzz when she died? I am reminded of Manny Farber's definition of the auteur theory: "A bunch of guys standing around trying to catch someone shoving art up into the crevices of dreck."'

That is more like it. Bringing in the Manny Farber is particularly good. Ebert lets you know that he is playing along here. Manny Farber was both a damn good painter and a damn good film critic, which is to say that he always understood something about formalists. But it is the following lines that really show that Ebert has made the formal leap that Kill Bill requires.

'Soon comes the deadly battle with The Bride, on a two-level set representing a Japanese restaurant. Tarantino has the wit to pace this battle with exterior shots of snowfall in an exquisite formal garden. Why must the garden be in the movie? Because gardens with snow are iconic Japanese images, and Tarantino is acting as the instrument of his received influences.'

That's the rub, Tarantino 'as the instrument of his received influences.' Brilliantly put. Formalists, at their best, are always that way. Gerhard Richter's room of dull mirrors at the Dia Beacon is completely pointless until you realize that he is working something out about the failures of memory and repetition. Then it can be a pretty amazing and moving room. If the child in Kill Bill behaved as a real child, as Denby wants, it would ruin everything. The child must learn to be empty so that she can live a life of killing and revenge. The form demands it.

- posted by Editor @ 4:48 PM

 
There has been some controversy regarding Jay-Z's latest, and perhaps last, video for '99 Problems.' The last scene of the video includes an extended sequence in which Jay-Z himself is blown away in a hail of gunfire. The metaphor is clear: this is the end of Jay-Z. From a man who has been threatening to retire his rap persona for some time it's a kind of farewell. And it's a farewell with all the ambiguities and mixed messages that have dogged rap from day one. The video as a whole is violent, sexist, thuggish in some way . . . and another masterpiece from one of the great rappers of his generation.

Everything that Jay-Z has done in the last couple of years has the self-assurance that only a great artist at the top of their field can muster. There is a grin on Jay-Z's face most of the time. It is the grin of a little boy having things his way. It is the grin of a bastard who won. The ancient Greeks used to call it 'acme.' When a person was at their acme they were at the height, fully habituated, in complete control of their world and their place within it. Nietzsche must have meant something like this when he talked about 'becoming what you are.' Jay-Z has fully become what he is. In his last video he has gone one step further and, at his acme, taken the audacious move of killing the self that he had become. Wonderful. Quite a Roman thing to do as well. Only Jay-Z among contemporary geniuses has the chutzpah to be both Greek and Roman at the same time. If Jay-Z is to be no more, then now is the time to give some form of thanks for what he was, the acme.

With the death of Jay-Z one final admission must be made. I grew up in Los Angeles and enjoyed the music of NWA, Ice Cube, et. alia. Snoop-Dog is another great master of his chosen genre. Snoop-Dog is as good as it gets. But East Coast rap is the best, all told. There, it has been said. Let us hope that I am not taken out in a flurry of gunfire for saying so but it must be said, as a tribute to mister Jay-Z if nothing else, that East Coast rap is the greatest. Shaolin forever.

- posted by Editor @ 6:33 PM

 
ADDENDUM TO LAS VEGAS POST

It occurs to me in taking the 7 train from Manhattan to Queens this evening that the 7 train itself is the closest thing one can find to a rollercoaster through the city. It is less spectacular as a ride than New York, New York, Las Vegas but it is pretty great. The train winds through the massive warehouses of Long Island City. These are great behemoths. Between them come glimpses of the storied highrises of the Manhattan skyline. The entire ride is certainly worth the admission, two dollars to the MTA. What a lesson in citydom.

The 7 train is something to be honored. It is a metal capsule shooting lengthwise across the city and carrying all manner of person across our urban beast. It is its own tribute really, to ride it is to face the human organism as it has seen fit to manifest itself right now in our world. The 7 train is everything that there is, the pandora train.

****

As Old Town Review is largely and importantly about dialogue I would initiate a controversial, across blog debate having read J.M. Tyree's recent posting about the movie Troy. His comments can be read in his May 15th posting of American Notes for General Circulation on this website. I haven't seen Troy, though as someone who has worked on ancient Greek for some years I am intrigued. But off the bat Idle Chatter has one objection to Tyree's post.

There is nothing controversial about amending stories of the Gods and heroes. It was part and parcel of Greek myth that multiple and sometimes conflicting versions of the stories existed side by side. It does not cancel Aeschylus to propose another version of Agamemnon's demise. Indeed, one of the interesting aspects of tragedy as a poetic form is the way it takes up earlier Homeric themes and makes them its own. The Greeks were not conservatives in the way that some later interpreters have interpreted. Troy may indeed be a very silly movie, but not because it has somehow tarnished what was always malleable in the first place.
- posted by Editor @ 12:07 AM

 
LAS VEGAS


You forget how much the sky can be different until you come out West again. There is a simple explanation. It has to do with flatness, it has to do with vistas. Maybe the idea of the West as simple and honest comes partly from that. You can see where the clouds are and where they've been and where they are going.

One of the myths that gets worked up into a reality in America is the one about the past and history and identity. It is a rejection of the ancient idea that character is fate. It is the idea that one can be anything one wants. The petitio principii at the heart of this proposition is patent and telling, but so what. There is no going back. Las Vegas is a place where it is pretty clear that no one is going back to anything. But at the same time, it is trying to have its cake and eat it too. There's no past in Vegas but at the same time it tries to fit the entirety of human history onto a few miles of the Strip, from the ancient pyramids to New York City. Pretty amazing.

What I'm trying to say is that Las Vegas makes no sense but it explodes into a phantasm every night anyway and then dies into the sunlight. It doesn't even really exist during the daytime. There is something a little sad about a place that is such a spectacle at night and so invisible during the day. It is an American sadness somehow, a Jay Gatsby sadness. And it is a strong sadness, or there's a strength in it. There's a depth there all of a sudden just when everything seemed pure surface.

Las Vegas evaporates into the sand, into bits of road that give up so suddenly it can make you laugh. All at once you're at the end of the world and there are just the dusty mountains beyond that make some final limit to how far the housing developments can creep. The desert said, "you can have this bowl in which to fester and glow." At the center of it all stands the Strip, generating the outward push.

The great casinos of the last fifteen years have developed according to one overriding impulse. That impulse has been to capture the imaginative spaces of the world for commerce. Of course, the real world spaces, Paris, Venice, New York, etc., are centers of commerce in themselves already. But what is immediately striking about Paris or Venice, Las Vegas is how each place has been contained, distilled, and represented as a manageable version of the original purged of everything but its symbolism and imagery reconstituted into gaming areas and shopping corridors. The thirst for civilizational spaces seems to be the primary driving force in the most recent incarnations of the Strip. The indeterminate fantasy zones, the Palms, Sands, Sahara, Flamingo, and even the more recent Treasure Island have receded into the background or disappeared altogether. The fun of those older fantasylands was the fun of pure play. They were escapes beyond the boundaries of any possible world. The newer spaces are interesting in that they are playing with the real world. Vegas has the audacity to recreate and thus lay some claim to the actual world, to other locations with which it shares space and time. And yet it is still under the guise of a giant wink and nudge, a knowing smile. But the sense of funny is muted. It's muted because of the sadness, the sadness that is, one must suppose, at the center of gambling and its infinite monotonous temporality. What a stunning audacity to claim the entirety of world culture for your own and then admit that you don't care, that it is as boring and empty as the mechanism of a slot machine - a machine that, in the end, merely produces randomness. And it might be an honest admission too. Las Vegas never seems to be having the fun that it claims to be having, is always more aware of itself than it would like to be. It's more exhausted than exhilarating. At least, this is how one can start to like it. There is something honest about it even as it is playing all these games and pretending to be so many things at once.

At New York, New York, Las Vegas they have built a rollercoaster that weaves in and out of the compacted skyline of New York City. It is fast and scary. You get a glimpse of the back side of the Statue of Liberty before you tumble down again in another loop or corkscrew. I love it. They should put one in the real New York. You could see people screaming in a loop around the Citicorp building or spiraling down the side of the Empire State. The theorists of simulacrum would send up a cry: one more defeat for the really real! But they would be wrong. There is no lack of reality on the Las Vegas Strip. It is just one more version of things. From the top of one the big drops at the New York rollercoaster you can see the mountains outside of Vegas for a moment before you plunge. If it is twilight you will see a very special desert light. It is soft and clear at the same time, gentle and brittle simultaneously. And then you speed down into Brooklyn while the whole car train screams and laughs in delight and the mountains are gone in the distance again. Las Vegas.

- posted by Editor @ 5:19 PM

 
It occurred to me that I ought, in a column like Idle Chatter, get to the business of writing a defense of Britney Spears. If anyone represents the battle between high and low culture and the supposed emptiness of popular culture it is Britney Spears. Her albums seem produced partly to give semi-talented music critics something to get indignant about. In a way, therefore, Britney is the great democratizer. Everybody knows that Britney Spears is trash and that her music is crap. Everybody. And, I like trash.

Thus I sat down to write a defense of Britney Spears. And I began to catalogue the things that I like about Britney Spears. And then I began to realize that I don't know what I like about Ms. Spears. Her music is basically impossible to like. It isn't good music, not even to dance to. And there isn't much else to Britney, except the sex. Admittedly I find her sexy. But I don’t really know why. She is rather plain looking. She has a nice body and she moves well but neither of those qualities are held in such abundance that they would be otherwise notable. She has a fulsome rump and I appreciate that. Maybe there is something intangible to her, a kind of star power and charisma. Fair enough. She has a flair for the controversial stunt that is just controversial enough but not too much so. In that sense one can admire her as the savvy showman and businessperson, a la Madonna. Doesn't add up to much in the end.

But I want to like her. Perhaps what I like is not so much her as the idea of her. I like the idea that there is a Britney Spears. I like Britney Spears because there is no greater justification for liking her than simply that one likes her. She occupies a impregnable cultural space really. To expend much energy critiquing her is to seem petty and misguided. And to extract some deep meaning out of the Britney phenomenon is to engage in something pompous and absurd. Her total lack of depth is her finest defense. Popular culture doesn't need to defend itself, it just needs to be entertaining and engaging. In the end, of course, the best products of popular culture are the ones that do have some depth, that reward one's attention with something more. But the argument that hard-nosed cultural critics like Adorno once presented was that culture was dangerous and politically stifling any time it did not provide such lofty material. For such minds, culture is constantly under the eye of an imperative. That imperative is to bring a richness and totality to human experience that either has been lost or never achieved in the first place. In the Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkeimer wrote that:

"Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. . . . The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the particular. Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce."

The tone of the above sentences is a mixture of truth-telling and prophecy. Whatever the failings and absurdities of our cultural industry in this, the beginning of the 21st century, the lines ring as neither true nor prophetic. If anything, they sound like they are coming to us quaintly and quietly from another era. And I suppose they are. In this era, Britney will be appearing in all manner of delightful outfits (and the near lack of them) for her Onyx Hotel tour throughout the nation over the next few months. You can buy tickets here.



- posted by Editor @ 8:43 PM

 
One of the more remarkable May 1sts passed by recently but with less fanfare than might have been expected. In a way it was the final in a long line of endings to the Cold War. Thus the irony of May 1st. Long a "red" holiday, the date now marks the unification of many of the East European countries with the rest of Europe after a long detour around the Iron Curtain.

But it is all very boring somehow. Eddie Izzard already diagnosed the symptom in a comedy routine in San Francisco during the nineteen-nineties when he said, I paraphrase, that the EU project is the most boring exciting moment in world history. And that is what it is, a moment of world historical, fascinating, transformative boredom. This all has something to do with Brussels. Brussels: the world headquarters of technocracy. A new period in world history, a new super-national political entity is being created, and it is being created by technocrats. Habermas and Derrida recognized the dilemma of this situation in their letter to Europe of last summer. They argued, partly, that Europe has all the technical trappings of a political entity without an identity that people can identify with. It is an abstraction cooked up and given birth from a strange brew of statecraft and real politik. And the dish is being prepared in Brussels.

Interestingly, the movements of passion and identity in Western politics have responded to this situation with confusion and lingering, if petulant, hostility. The hard Left and the hard Right are perfectly aware that the triumph of the EU is not their triumph. Let us be honest. The triumph of the EU is a triumph of moderate liberal democracy and free, if variously regulated, markets. It's a triumph of democratic capitalism. And proponents of well-run democratic capitalism are not given much to visionary language and trips to the barricades. They paint grey on grey. They talk about things like the end of history and point to Belgium when they say it. They cheerily admit that the great earth shaking political movements in the world are dead. They say that ideology is dead. They look back to Europe and its centuries of war after war and say that a lot of things are dead. If they read some philosophy in younger years they smile to themselves that Kant finally got his Perpetual Peace, if not exactly how he envisaged it. If they have a little Sebald in them they shudder a bit when they look back, haunted by terrors, and try and close the book on the twentieth century.

That is what is going on in Europe right now and its an amazing thing. But it is the triumph of regulation and managing over sadness and no one is quite sure how you are supposed to celebrate that. The lingering and pitiful revolutionaries throw a bottle or two but their hearts aren't really in it. It may be hard to love technocrats but it is hard to hate them too.

Strange then, that in this time of great changes and new political entities, thoughts by Jacques Barzun about Walter Bagehot would sound so relevant. Barzun writes,

"By his assorted examples from English history, Bagehot illustrates what we all now perceive about modern life: it sows uniformity and reaps monotony. He may therefore be of greater use to us when in the other half of his doctrine he reminds us that 'the common mass of plain sense is the great administrative agency of the world'; that 'the constitutional statesman' is not a man of original ideas but ‘a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.'"

One of the things that Barzun always understood was that the great figures of Romanticism, from the nineteenth century to today, have always articulated some aspect of the human make-up that revolts against the monotony and uniformity our other half recognizes to be just and prudent. The old Left and the old Right have died, and their version of Romantic striving is fading away. The question is what the new race of Romantics will look like. And will they ally in some strange brew with the boys in Brussels or will they strike out for something else? Is there anything in the new dream of the super-nation that can be made lofty? Is the EU beautiful somehow? I think it is. But it is also very boring.

- posted by Editor @ 2:18 PM

 
Calling this venture Idle Chatter is an in-joke probably among even those relative few who have had the time or folly to slog through all four hundred and thirty-seven pages of Heidegger's Being and Time. It's a philosophical in-joke, then. Probably the worst kind of in-joke. But I'm sticking to it anyway. I'll explain.

Division I, Section V, Paragraph 35 of Being and Time is entitled Idle Chatter. Macquarrie and Robinson, in the Harper Collins edition translate it as 'Idle Talk.' The German is Gerede, which has an undeniably pejorative connotation. Macquarrie and Robinson recognize as much in footnote 1 of that section, page 211 of their edition. They write, "It is not easy to translate 'Gerede' in a way which does not carry disparaging connotations. Fortunately Heidegger makes his meaning quite clear." That is a funny thing to say since they seem to have missed his greater point altogether.

But what they refer to is the first few lines of the section. There, Heidegger writes, "The expression 'idle talk' is not to be used here in a disparaging signification. Terminologically, it signifies a positive phenomenon which constitutes the kind of Being of everyday Dasein's understanding and interpreting."

So, Macquarrie and Robinson translate Gerede as 'idle talk' instead of the more natural 'idle chatter' in order to take account of this anachronistic usage. When Heidegger uses the term Gerede, they surmise, he is talking about the way human beings communicate with one another in an everyday manner. And what could be wrong with that?

For Heidegger, plenty. Which isn't to say that Heidegger is opposed to Gerede per se. Human beings wouldn't be human beings if they didn't have everyday means of communication. What Heidegger objects to about Gerede is that in modern society it threatens to become the dominant means of communication. This would lead, for Heidegger, to a society that has no depth, to human beings who have lost touch with the more important questions. As he puts it in his inimitable style:

"Idle talk, which closes things off in the way we have designated, is the kind of Being which belongs to Dasein's understanding when that understanding has been uprooted. Ontologically this means that when Dasein maintains itself in idle talk, it is - as Being-in-the-world - cut off from its primary and primordially genuine relationships-of-Being towards the world, towards Dasein-with, and towards its very Being-in."

I call this column Idle Chatter as an affirmation of all the things that Heidegger would denigrate. For Heidegger is ultimately attacking the modern aspects of civil society, cosmopolitanism, urbanity, and fluidity. One can imagine him sitting in a trolley car in Berlin disgusted by all the idle chatter murmuring up around him. I title this venture Idle Chatter in honor of all the murmuring on the A train and the 7 train and the hopelessly ungrounded streets of the world's great, if flawed, metropolis. I suspect that there are no 'genuine relationships-of-Being towards the world.' I propose we not be bothered by that fact. Idle Chatter isn't bothered by that fact. It takes it for granted and then peers in to all the things that are remarkable and interesting about the world as it is.

- posted by Editor @ 1:07 AM