tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49395407096663456562024-03-05T22:20:07.295-05:00private matters and public thingsa blog about comedy and jokesSammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.comBlogger97125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-82397644649986216502012-05-03T23:58:00.000-04:002012-05-05T23:51:52.584-04:00The Politics of 30 RockMaybe it's my <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/letters/story/2012-05-03/chirs-mooney-republican-brain/54733296/1">brain</a> (according to all the recent science, everything political can be explained by brains: MRIs expose how amygdala activity determines if you're a Republican, skin conductivity proves you're an Independent), maybe I'm just "<a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/05/03/republican_fear_factor_salpart/">hard-wired</a>" this way, but I actually think <i>30 Rock</i> is a pretty liberal show.<br />
<a name='more'></a> A <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/05/02/a_conservative_show_goes_liberal/singleton/">recent article in salon</a> mentioned in passing that <i>30 Rock</i> "seems more liberal than it is."
Nay, I know not seems. The salon author links to a post from 2009 on a site called <i>Overthinking It</i> (<a href="http://www.overthinkingit.com/about/">"About <i>Overthinking It</i></a>: <i>Overthinking It</i> subjects the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve" . . . if that isn't a prissily ironic, self-glorifyingly self-deprecating, <i>faux</i> defensive <i>faux</i> humility which would blossom into a pink burp of delight if it knew Joss Whedon smiled slightly when he read it, I don't know what is.)<br />
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I'm not going to dwell on the analysis, because 1) the post is from 2009, it'd be a bit like nitpicking an obscure 1933 review of a reissue of <i>The Sound and The Fury</i>; and 2) The author of the piece admits at the start that this analysis is not coming from an expert in <i>30 Rock</i>, and goes so far as to link to another site (<a href="http://bloglynch.blogspot.com/2009/06/30-rock-is-rip-off-of-muppet-show.html">here</a>, if you must) which erroneously, wildly, but with three stars for effort, tries to argue that <i>30 Rock</i> is a modern rip-off of the <i>Muppet Show</i>.
Analyses of politics and comedy tend to make a common mistake: presuming that every laugh is equal. If a show invites you to laugh at a conservative figure and a liberal figure - at Jack Donaghy's neoconservative asides, his mastubatory contempt for liberals and anything liberals could conceivably stand for, his hypermasculinity, which launches so far into masculinity that it manages to transcend homosexuality into a type of Republican eroticized-male-love without an iota of queerness; at Liz Lemon's shallow, compromised liberalism, her prurient modern moralizing - then it must be somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. If a show then has the conservative figure turning out to be correct much of the time, then it must be siding with that character, and belong further on the right. And if it targets certain presumably precious liberal topics, then all the more evidence it isn't as darlingly liberal as presumed - see, for example: David Schwimmer's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F3qv8VgfFE">brilliant cameo</a> as Greenzo; or consider how <i>30 Rock</i> will be banned from the retinal implants our descendants will use for entertainment because Tracy Jordan is the personification of every single racist stereotype from the nineteenth century to the twenty first; and yes, Hazel Wassername's virulent lesbianity and Jenna Maroney's narcissistic desires are mocked.<br />
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The problem with these calculations is that comedy is not so virtuous or so superficial. It won't support simplistic political assessments. We do not simply laugh <i>at</i> or laugh <i>with</i>; we do both at the same times, in unequal measure, a mishmash of sympathy and derision that obviates subsequent political algebras. What compels us to laugh is a much denser appreciation of the context: that a foaming and prickly liberal, Alec Baldwin, plays the neocon Jack Donaghy, and he does so sensitively and lovingly; that <i>David Schwimmer</i> plays Greenzo, who is a "non-judgemental, business-friendly environmental advocate"; that Jenna Maroney's sexual cavalcade is grotesque and needy but also blossoming and brave, a mixture of desperation and optimism, of fierce engagement with life and denial; that Tracy Jordan, Grizz, and Dot Com are constantly facing race as something that invariably defines them, forcing them always to play a role, which Tracy, more than anybody, is trying to escape (Tracy is often standing in front of the poster for his film, <i>Black Cop/White Cop</i>, in which he plays both roles, the latter in whiteface, which should hint at some of the layers of impersonation taking place).<br />
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Comedy, in its rich, contradictory ambiguity, is a retribution against purity. Extracted, distilled, it ceases to exist; it only lives in murky, bitter liquors. The problem is not with <i>30 Rock</i> or its audience, which apparently fails to realise that the show isn't as liberal as it seems. The problem here is the charade of political nomenclature that pretends to know what it is talking about, the purity hardwired into most pop discourses about 'liberal' and 'conservative'. Of course these categories exist; but lazily applying them to a comedy, based on assumptions that in comedy one can find a general clarity in the distinction between <i>laughing at</i> and <i>laughing with</i>, a clarity in characterisation, and a lack of irony, impersonation, and confusion, is doomed, just doomed. For a wonderfully confused piece of writing - sometimes quickly backpedalling, sometimes almost drunkenly confident - about television and politics, see gawker's piece <a href="http://gawker.com/5063314/the-most-conservative-and-most-liberal-shows-on-tv">here</a>.Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-65911385490332791012012-03-21T17:40:00.005-04:002012-03-21T18:26:05.330-04:00Update! Rupert Pupkin apologisesHey De Niro, say it ain't so! <br /><br />The former King of Comedy makes a perfectly good joke about the media-blight of minority-preparedness ("Are we ready for a gay bishop?" "Are we ready for an Asian NBA player?") and suddenly a bunch of globular, jowly white guys are acting like he just found the burial plots of their dearly beloved ancestors, unearthed them, and urinated into the empty holes while doing his very own De Niro impression. <br /><br />His apology is somewhat politically-savvy, as De Niro tries to ensure that it is obvious his main concern is Michelle Obama.<br /><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/21/entertainment-us-deniro-obama-idUSBRE82K1GU20120321"><br /><blockquote>"My remarks, although spoken with satirical jest, were not meant to offend or embarrass anyone -- especially the first lady," De Niro said in a statement.<br /></blockquote></a><br /><br />I'm not sure what to make of a 'satirical jest', much less how one speaks with satirical jest, and we've dealt with the bizarre issue of intent before: a great joke suddenly hinges on some excavation of intent; but the three grotesqueries remain: the joke was not racist, and somehow a bunch of white guys are victims of ersatz racism; the Obamas will always bow to the moral authority of right wing demagogues; and, gosh, aren't these old white goats great defenders of their ladies' honour?Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-14020293312486882102012-03-20T21:14:00.005-04:002012-05-05T23:50:09.509-04:00The Gingrich Who Stole RaceI'm done, I'm through, I've had it. Really, I give up. You know that really cute saying by Tom Lehrer about how awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Kissinger <a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/tom-lehrer,13660">made satire obsolete</a>? At a certain point, you just reach the end of your rope and you say, it's over. Lehrer continued to write satire, he continued to work in parody, he refused to give up; I, on the other hand, think there is no more point having any sort of conversation about comedy. <br />
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Newt Gingrich, a man sculpted by God from leftovers from Rush Limbaugh's right buttock, has demanded apologies for a joke Robert De Niro made at a fundraiser. Gingrich called the joke inexcusable; he wants President Obama to apologise. And you know what? Because the fundraiser was attended by Michelle Obama, and because the joke involved her, Michelle Obama's people . . . agreed, and called the joke 'inappropriate.' They caved in, they agreed with Gingrich, and they threw De Niro out of the back of a bus, so to speak.<br />
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That's the country, and that's this presidency, in a squirrel-gnawed nutshell.<br />
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But wait, what was the joke? Maybe it really was bad. Well, I've discussed a lot of awful jokes on this blog, I've taken you, my iron-stomached readership, into the purulently-moist, fetid pools of sick jokes, but for this joke, you're going to need a metal bin beside your computer, because after you've read it, you're either going to be spewing with convulsive disgust or collecting all your De Niro posters, books, and DVDs and setting them alight. So, prepare yourselves. Here we go.<br />
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"Callista Gingrich. Karen Santorum. Ann Romney. Now do you really think our country is ready for a white First Lady?" he asked the crowd. "Too soon, right?"</blockquote>
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Oh. I see. <br />
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Now, we all know that Callista Gingrich, Karen Santorum, and Ann Romney have struggled every day of their lives with the burden of being white, the prejudice, the long history of oppression, the dense social matrix of adversity that faced them as whites; we know that there have been countless articles in newspapers and magazines asking if America is "ready" for a white person in the White House; and for the past three years, they have been unable to look at the White House and see a role model who looks just like them there, and when they were little girls, they were told they would never see someone who looked like them in the White House, but the whole point is . . . we're past that. Those days are over. What the hell was De Niro thinking?<br />
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As <a href="http://www.local10.com/news/politics/Campaign-calls-De-Niro-comment-inappropriate-after-Gingrich-blast/-/1895020/9610140/-/m5jlt4/-/">Gingrich</a> said:<br />
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"I do want to say one thing, both on behalf of my wife and on behalf of Karen Santorum and on behalf of Ann Romney, I think that Robert De Niro's wrong," Gingrich said. "I think the country is ready for a new first lady and he doesn't have to describe it in racial terms."</blockquote>
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No, De Niro didn't. Unlike Gingrich, he's caught up in the racial past, he's stewing in history, and, clearly unlike Gingrich, he's not a gentleman. De Niro is a racist, and he also lacks Gingrich's silky chivalry. What a cad.<br />
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Santorum - <a href="http://blog.spreadingsantorum.com/">not the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes a side-product of anal sex</a>, but the politician - said:<br />
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"It's sad, but I'm not going to bite on that one. It's just sad. The idea of looking at politics through eyes of race should be over. That's just over. I don't know where he thinks he's coming from."</blockquote>
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Race is over, it's just over. <br />
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I was going to write a long blog post, discussing how these contrived affairs around comedy do several things, the most impressive of which is to <span style="font-style: italic;">ignore the actual content of the comedy</span>. Cf. Jyllands-Posten. But I don't really have to, because somebody else got there first, and was much, much more concise than I was going to be. That someone was Ann Coulter, tweeting:<br />
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<a href="http://www.mediaite.com/online/ann-coulter-robert-deniro/attachment/capture-406/">"Can we please stop the fake "offended" routine? Pls explain what was allegedly offensive about DeNiro's joke?"</a></blockquote>
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When Ann Coulter intervenes in the interpretation of comedy, my job here is done.Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-36830193365476155452012-03-14T12:47:00.002-04:002012-03-14T13:07:05.254-04:00Well judgedIt's important to know what's what on the internet. News organizations, including ones that are not overtly propaganda wings of the Republican party, are perfectly happy to promote <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/14/opinion/kagan-world-america-made/index.html?hpt=hp_c2">frank nationalist propaganda</a> disguised as the public service of 'opinion', although they're also entirely willing to disseminate <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/12/opinion/matalin-gop-primary/index.html?iref=allsearch">Republican party propaganda</a>; things that are NSFW tend to be disappointingly SFW, but are still NSFW, reflecting how low the bar is set on what is considered suitable or not suitable for work, which, come to think of it, is not a bad thing: hey, just over a week until <span style="font-style:italic;">Mad Men</span> is back; the best things are still ones you <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-03-14/columns/Michael-Musto-why-i-hate-movies/">read in print</a>, but it's exciting that you're not limited to print, even if when you read it on a blog, you're constantly following links, most of which are not edifying; and anyway, I was looking up the correct spelling of e-mail/email and came across <a href="http://www.thefictiondesk.com/blog/spelling-email-vs-e-mail/">this</a>, which is helpful but also, I thought, very funny in a well-judged way. It was nice to come across something that wasn't trying too hard and yet had a lovely touch with a good line, quoted or its own.Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-63142406500393461762012-03-10T14:12:00.004-05:002012-05-05T23:50:56.948-04:00Sarah and her Lesbian NieceIt's really great finding a clip of a comedian at her peak and getting the chance to see her do one of those near perfect acts where every line is perfectly weighted, perfectly sharpened - the line is often long passed before you see how deeply you've been slit. In this case, there's an added bonus. The audience really doesn't seem to like her very much; it's a very generous audience, you can tell that much, but they're not really that keen. For most of the video, I'm wondering if they detest her or simply don't get her. Still, there's a gorgeously horrible moment towards the end when the audience is finally coming around and they really get hooked.<br />
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An alert member of the elite readers of this blog sent me <a href="http://www.ijhssnet.com/update/archive/729-vol-1-no-20-december-2011abstract6.html">this link</a> to a paper, "What makes humour aesthetic?" <br />
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I'm not going to lie, I'm not going to make idiots of you, I'm not going to take you on a ride on my spangled unicycle down stupid lane . . . I only skimmed this paper. Barely. I haven't studied it deeply, I am not presenting you with a comprehensive rebuttal, I'm not hitching you on a spangled unicycle and taking you down brilliant analysis lane.<br />
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But it includes one of my favourite quotes from the humor philosopher, John Morreal:<br />
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In aesthetic experience, we are not out for sexual gratification, enhanced self esteem, or other self-interested emotions, but are enjoying the experience of the object itself. Here there is a parallel between funny objects and aesthetic objects in general. Any work of art, or any natural object, can be enjoyed in non-aesthetic as well as in aesthetic ways. A general could enjoy a sunset for its promise of clear weather for his dawn attack. Someone could masturbate looking at the Venus de Milo.</blockquote>
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I'm sorry, is there something else you're supposed to do when looking at the Venus de Milo? I got some funny looks when I did it in front of the Mona Lisa, but that was mostly because I was the only person there working both ends at once. Really. Come on. Enough is enough. It's like Catholicism here, where the celibates get to define the limits of carnality. Why should the non-masturbators get to define the limits of aesthetics?<br />
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Anyway, the author of the paper smooshes Morreal under his thumb but, like a foolish, ambitious general who quashes a village and now decides he's Alexander the Great and sets about conquering the entire known world, he won't let a small victory suffice; he leaves the smoldering ruins and charred heaps of Morreal, where the survivors howl and claw through the charcoaled remains, turns to face the loud, storming world of comedy and says, "I'm coming to get you, and I've got a theory." Little does he know . . .<br />
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In his theory, he's trying to distinguish aesthetic from non-aesthetic humor:<br />
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Thus, I would like to propose the following hypothesis, which will be tested shortly: humor is aesthetic to the extent that it arouses the viewers’ imagination, provides them with insights about human existence, and provokes them to think more critically and creatively. My contention is, therefore, that even if the humor in question is very amusing and funny, if it does not meet these three essential conditions, then it should not be considered aesthetic.</blockquote>
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Now, I think this is absolutely fine. In fact, it's great and he is exactly right. He's exactly right because he is simply making stuff up and so he can create it and define it any way he likes, just as I now will make up the concept of arachnohumanism, which requires that somebody live in a flat or apartment that is web-like, drinks dew or the equivalent of dew (municipal water will do), and multi-tasks (i.e. metaphorically has eight arms and legs). This should be distinguished from another form of arachnohumanism, which I define as an affinity for constantly creating new works of art, new business models, novelty of some sort, in order to attract mates and earn money. We can sit around all day and make stuff up and define it and then see what fits and what doesn't. <br />
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Anyway, the author of the paper goes on to diss a Sarah Silverman passage as 'non-aesthetic', comparing it unfavourably to a Carlin and a Pryor passage, both of which are 'aesthetic'. It's a bit like condemning Shakespeare by quoting some boringly lovelorn shepherd in one of the problem plays and comparing it to a favourite piece of Ovid and Homer. <br />
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The real problem is that comedy infiltrates those areas of existence that are not supposed to be aesthetic -- David Chappelle says reality is hidden for a reason, these area of existence are 'not supposed to be aesthetic' for reasons: for moral reasons, because of their ugliness, because of their banality, because of their privilege. The real problem is in distinguishing 'aesthetic humor' from 'non-aesthetic humor' (an argument that we'll leave for a rainy day; there really is none; it's all aesthetic); no, it's how comedy is like somebody standing in front of the Venus de Milo, wanking, and everybody realises: <span style="font-style: italic;">that's right</span>. He <span style="font-style: italic;">gets it.</span>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-34541163554446221692012-01-24T21:43:00.002-05:002012-01-24T21:44:14.072-05:00A Sad Day for MelancholiaAbsolutely no Oscar nominations for the Best Film of 2011, starring the persons who deserved Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor? Sigh.Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-68250062186638672512011-12-16T10:49:00.003-05:002011-12-16T10:58:42.173-05:00Without a HitchI had a rather pleasant image of Hitchens walking through the pearly gates, scowling at the angels and shaking his head with disgust at a very long, smug queue of the bovine deist-departed waiting to have their first meeting with God; St Peter puts an arm around his shoulder and says, "Well, on the bright side", as he steers Hitchens to a celestial bar where the Scotch is good, cigarettes are lit with stars, and the conversation is about to get better.Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-14535086637396906562011-12-07T13:19:00.011-05:002012-05-05T23:51:19.844-04:00The Choleric PurpleOne of the things about writing that can be really annoying is when other people do it. <br />
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I hasten to add: there are some people out there who write very well and I am really glad they do. Haruki Murakami. Philip Roth. I could name literally <i>hundreds </i>more. But the rest? Like little ticker-machines producing airribbons of language in a continuous chattering stream, the invisible snake-like wordribbons evaporating into a coffee-scented breeze around our chests; horribly, a great many of these coils are translated into print and then pasted across our visors. <br />
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A lot of the people who write shit and say shit should just be shot, and twitter would largely determine who would be first against the wall. But there are some people who are really annoying even if you think that maybe over a beer or if they were giving you a massage, you might quite like them. There's Hugh Muir <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/dec/06/why-is-britain-becoming-intolerant">over at the <i>Guardian </i>today</a>; I don't know much about Hugh Muir; he seems like a good bloke, although with his rather phlegmatic article today and its ham-handed, glib references to comedy, he should go by the moniker "Bad Hugh Muir".</div>
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(I googled this; nobody seems to have made this joke before? Christ . . . <i>Christ!</i> What sort of monster must he be that nobody has <i>dared </i>call him . . . Hughmuirless? Or maybe people will whisper it ("Hey now, he's a bit . . . <i>hughmuirless.</i>" "<i>Shhhh</i>!") but are scared to write it? Perhaps he's some sort of SAS-Clive Owen figure: ruthless, righteous, determined to avenge any insults, as tough as the nails crapped out by a Welshman who wanted a little light snack. Or maybe it's not a matter of fear; maybe it's because he is too precious, too beloved? . . . . Or did he <i>die</i>? Am I joking about a man writing from the beyond the grave, about whom nobody would be so crass as to make a joke?)</div>
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Anyway, there are a couple really important lessons we can learn as Hugh Muir vents his spleen.</div>
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1) When you write, it is quite possible to write nothing at all:</div>
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If someone hasn't taken the handbrake off – facilitating a slow but steady decline towards grouchiness and intolerance and not a little meanness – it certainly feels like it.</blockquote>
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"If someone hasn't taken the handbrake off . . . it certainly feels like it." That doesn't actually mean anything. And I'm sure <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/01/the-cliche-expert-discusses-the-tablet.html">the Cliche Expert</a> would, <i>ahem</i>, have a field day with "slow but steady" and "not a little"; and, mechanically, does taking a handbrake off actually facilitate a decline? Really, this paragraph is perfect journalistic puff: profoundly expressionistic and fundamentally preverbal, rather like having somebody fart in your face and then turn to you with an inquiring glance, "Well?" </div>
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Well <i>what</i>, exactly?</div>
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2) When you write, you can evoke an expert in something that may have some sort of vague relevance to whatever it is you're talking about (any sort of professor of psychology would do, regardless of the actual topic), who actually admits that he is not an expert in what you're talking about, and can turn this multiply-layered lack of expertise into something that suddenly sounds like expertise by groping for a historical reference that manages to do two things at once: prove that the entire point you're making is itself a gnarled, hoary stump of an opinion that may have been freshly-sprouted and newly-minted about two millenia ago, and turn this into the nostalgia you're touting. In other words, you evoke a pseudo-Dickens figure to shill the same old nostalgic tripe about things getting worse is a kind of warm-hearted sentimentality, like Christmas carols.</div>
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Now, if you think that this whole preceding paragraph includes multiple diverse claims, I promise you: the same paragraph could be written about dozens, and maybe hundreds, of the editorials groaned out through the puckered wordholes of pundits across the land.</div>
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3) Although this does happen to be specifically relevant to Hugh Muir's melancholic article about Britain today, I would suggest that <i>every </i>piece of writing should commence under a large photograph of John Terry shouting what looks to be the "ack" in "Black Cunt". I have pasted the photograph heading Hugh Muir's piece below:</div>
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<img alt="John Terry of Chelsea" src="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2011/12/6/1323194951207/John-Terry-of-Chelsea-007.jpg" /></div>
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4) I have made three arguments so far about other people's writing: their writing can be meaningless; it can be misleading; a picture of John Terry shouting "Ack" is worth a million of their words. </div>
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But the last thing that needs to be said is a single word of its own: poetry. Like Joyce before him, Hugh Muir bears the sanguine knowledge that a concatenation of cliches has its own poetry; the final paragraph to his article is a small modernist masterpiece, not so much a mental wordpicture as a Yuletide paean to national salvation through banality, its heritage rooted firmly in one of D.H. Lawrence's most famous <a href="http://www.blueridgejournal.com/poems/dhl-nice.htm">poems</a>: </div>
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And that is a point worth ending on. For even if things do seem to be unravelling a bit, this is a still a small island nation that strives, with some success, to fuse the destinies of people who have been here for hundreds of years with those of people who arrived yesterday. People with all sorts of complexions, all kinds of lifestyles; people with strong religious beliefs, people with none. We live together in cities, not in silos. We tend not to pry, but, if needed, we try to help. We try to live and let live. There are problems – the events of a turbulent summer and all we learned from those who were involved show that. There are serious challenges. But given the potential for division and societal dysfunction, the record is pretty good. It is right to take stock, and hopefully we will return to equilibrium, emerging a little less cranky. Still, the UK with the handbrake off remains a better place to be than many others with the handbrake firmly engaged.</blockquote>
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*slow clap . . .</div>
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*slow clap . . .</div>
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*slow clap . . .</div>
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*someone else joins in, slow clap</div>
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*slow clap</div>
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*slow clapping, more joining in</div>
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*slow clapping, getting louder</div>
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*slow clapping, getting faster</div>
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*clapping</div>
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*loud hard clapping</div>
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*loud whoops and cheers</div>
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*more cheers and laughter</div>
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*Joyously insert <i>Love Actually</i> into arse </div>
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*<i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A8KT365wlA">IT'S CHRISTMAS</a></i></div>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-7451994711745225832011-11-18T09:10:00.042-05:002012-05-06T00:02:20.685-04:00They're baa-aackImagine I have my hands lightly on your shoulders, my face only inches from your own; I'm looking straight into your eyes, you can smell my licorice-scented breath as I say to you, "You know the joke's on you, right? You <i>get</i> that, don't you?"<br />
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A few days ago, a reporter with a news camera was <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/reporter-roughed-cain-event-161618108.html">roughed up</a> by a cop operating as some sort of bodyguard for Herman Cain. He pushed her into Cain's campaign bus and then clotheslined her. The cop's commanding officer justified his vigorous oaf's assault as concern for the safety of Herman Cain; Lt. McHugh of the Coral Springs Police Department went on to add that "the officer, Sgt William Reid, suffered a hyper-extended elbow." Aha! The cop (whose name was not given in the news report until this point, when his suffering deserved a proper noun and a subjectivity) was the real victim here. His elbow was hyper-extended as he knocked the reporter off her feet. Can you imagine what sort of damage she did to the cartilage and ligaments in his elbow as she hurled herself into his arm?</div>
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It's <i>comic</i>.<br />
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And as we discussed the other day, the <a href="http://privatematters4publicthings.blogspot.com/2011/11/mockupy-wall-street.html">real public health problem</a> is not the socioeconomic disparities that result in the death of, say, children; it's the scourge of protesters, who need to be removed for public health reasons, according to and under the orders of a man who has given his name to the John Hopkins School of Public Health.</div>
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More comedy.</div>
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It's philosophically tempting to argue that life is a joke. Our inherent human dignity, the innate dignity we are bestowed with by the Author of Life and the United Nations Charter on Human Rights, which begins with the squelching, pumping, grimacing, splurting act of fornication that allows a tiny tadpole to jam its protein-laden head into a moon-like ovum, an innate dignity that somehow survives the act of birth, another squelching, liquory, splashing, grimacing act of propulsion, is then, after all that, forever challenged by a lifetime of belching, farting, public and private embarrassment, and, for many of us, more or fewer grimacing propulsive acts committed alone or with another grimacing squelching person or, for some lucky few, roomfuls of grimacing squelching people. The difference between our own enduring and fundamental human dignity and the constant, bathetic, spontaneous, surprising, animal failures to sustain this dignity for more than a few seconds at a time is quite a joke. In fact, the comedy begins at the outset: it takes a tremendous amount of wit to look at humans and say, "Yes, this lot is fundamentally, innately dignified." Do you really think that aliens will land, observe us, and think, "<i>These</i> must have been made in God's image"?</div>
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The philosophical joke presumes that our dignity (or autonomy, or free will, or agency) is subverted by our indignities; it's humanistic because the comedy recovers from indignity a dignity of its own: the comic dignity of insight, of resilience in fallibility, where we laugh at the exposure of our own fall from grace and, in laughing, obtain for ourselves a new grace, imbued with wise benevolence, sympathy for our efforts in the charade, and even a sort of secular (though often deist) transcendence: we rise above ourselves at the moment when we fall. </div>
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At its core, though, there's an admirable ambiguity in this philosophical joke about human life: the resolution it presumes to offer is not perfect and is never complete: the conceit that dignity leads to indignity that leads to dignity is a wackily spinning whirlpool that can suck anything into its chaotically self-propagating swirl - whatever presumes to inhere in dignity, every striving of humanity, can get caught in the suction; it's a sucking funnel with no end in sight, but at least we can say that we have a whirlpool in the pond of human life, a black hole in our soul, and we can laugh about it.</div>
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What is more intriguing is the comedy that does not submit to comedy's promises of recovery and reunion in laughter, its promise that the coordination of "we laugh at ourselves" will put us into a stable, if ambiguous set of relationships with ourselves. This marginal comedy is far broader, its range much wider than the humanistic philosophy that would argue life is comic because life is a joke, but it's also harder to grasp in its diffusion and its problematics. It's the comedy that refuses to conform to the rules of comedy, whether it disposes with the nods and winks and silly voices that establish the comic voice or subverts the structural forms that clue us in to the comedic performance, where the parodic is not wholly distinct from the object of parody because, though it remains ridiculous, it nevertheless commits to whatever the object of parody is committed to (usually the parody is <i>committed</i> only to the object of parody) - recall, for example, your first encounter with, say, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRYNYb30nxU">The Darkness</a>, where you think you are witnessing a Spinal Tap-like parody of hair metal, and then how you experienced the unsettlingly delicious creeping realisation that, though in every respect parodic, The Darkness is more committed to hair metal than to any parody of hair metal. </div>
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Crucially, the comedy we are discussing is the comedy that does not allow us to find a fingerhold in the seam that separates it from the earnest or the serious. It's the comedy that is not funny and is rarely pleasing (though The Darkness would qualify as pleasing); it's the comedy of a cop complaining about the injury sustained to his "hyper-flexed" elbow after clotheslining a reporter; it's the comedy of a man who has given his name to a prominent school of public health defending his interests in a scheme whose public health consequences are measured in childhood mortality and excess deaths, as he uses the rhetoric of public health with media-saturated metaphors of pollution and the metonymies of disease to dissent and difference to send in armed forces to remove people protesting that scheme. </div>
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All of which to say is that Die Antwoord have released the new single from their new album! An alert reader (an alert reader in general; there is no indication the person is an alert reader <i>of this blog)</i> sent me an e-mail last night to notify me of this:</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="225" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/31730747?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="400"></iframe><br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/31730747">FOK JULLE NAAIERS</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user4793477">Die Antwoord</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</div>
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Die Antwoord has explored many dimensions of hip hop and rap, from fluid flow and rave to beat box and bouncy (the latter a category that probably has a proper name, but I don't know it; I don't know if "fluid flow" is a real category either, but let's pretend it is); in <i>Fok Julle Naaiers</i> they go gangster, full throttle. </div>
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Theirs is the comedy of the margin - no, let me be more specific: theirs is the comedy of one point in the margin between the serious or earnest and the comic. The margin is a long one, and it includes off-duty cops with hyperextended elbows, Michael Bloomberg, Die Antwoord, Jody Hill, Lenny Bruce before he was "Lenny Bruce", the long thin mined stretch of tangled weeds and barbed wire where comedy is not fully distinguished from the serious. </div>
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In her <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yolandi_Visser">wikipedia entry</a> ("her" wikipedia entry? Does it belong to her? Did she author it?), Yolandi Visser is described as a rapper with Die Antwoord, an "experimental (and partly satirical) rap group"; whoever wrote "partly satirical" is onto something, but the question remains: how <i>much</i> is "partly", and <i>which part</i>? In another wikipedia entry, Die Antwoord is roped into a category called "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-irony">post-irony</a>" (as one example; BTW, the other example given, at least of the time of this writing, is Werner Herzog's <i>Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans . . . </i>hmm?): the temporal equivocation of "post" and the uncertainty of the relationship assumed between the "post-ironic" and the ironic, cast into a temporal term that in no way articulates the nature of the relationship, is another gesture towards the margin. The margin is geographical, a land divided but whose borders are contested: part serious, part satirical; it is temporal: coming after or beyond the ironic (which is presumed here to be a stable category with its own in relation to the serious: the ironic is the ostensibly serious that contains the comic disruption of what constitutes the "ostensibly" and the seriousness, a doubled capacity of unlimited disruptive potential - so what, precisely, comes <i>after</i> that?).</div>
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Why might we put Die Antwoord in the category of the comic at all? Well, Die Antwoord is an extension of their earlier character-driven Hip Hop and rap projects - Max Normal TV, the Constructus Corporation - which have clear signifiers of the comic: incongruities, ill-fitting clothes of the clown; Die Antwoord is another act of impersonation and mimicry, the Ninja another skit after Max Normal. Even in their masterpiece-to-date, <i>Enter the Ninja</i>, the Ninja intrudes with a goofy interlude and the lovely comic error of spouting erroneous bravado ("all over the interwebs"). The Keith Haring-like cartoons that decorate Die Antwoord backdrops and clothing feature the prominent phallus that links comedy from Trey Parker and Matt Stone back to its ancient origins on the stage.</div>
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In <i>Fok Julle Naaiers</i>, they bring their part satirical, post-ironic, comedy of the margin to the hard-core, full-throttle gangster track, which ends with a tremendous Kanyesian beat over which DJ Hi-tek tells us he's going to . . . well, you heard what he said. </div>
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Now, once again, I've got my hands lightly on your shoulders, I'm staring you in the eye, and I'm telling you: this is the gayest gangster rap track ever laid down. </div>
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It's not; but I'm not entirely joking.</div>
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Now, one might think the video is a touch, well, homophobic. Although <i>Fok Julle Naaiers</i> apparently means something along the lines of "screw y'all", I can't help but think it's a distant, contracted echo of "To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar"; the aggression comes with the faint hint of drag. But then again, what are we to make of a video that has rampaging phalluses and all the magnetic attraction to the male body of a trembling closeted Republican delegate standing at the urinal next to Rick Perry; it's a video that could be posted under a new wikipedia entry for "Rough Trade", a video that Morrissey has no doubt watched over hundred times (with the sound on mute); where lithe masculine figures mouth the woman's, Yolanda Visser's, lines (did you spot that?) Straight sexuality is granted the atavistic metaphor of the disgust and beauty of insects, and bisected into the flapping, vaginal butterfly and the wiry pricks of scorpions and slimy coils of worms. We have an entire package of ambiguity in relationship to sensuality: desire and repulsion, come-ons and fuck-offs, menacing men mouthing the female chorus; and all this leads to a monstrous rampage of ass-rape-threat. I'm not going to say it's not homophobic. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the line where DJ Hi-tek suggests that there's a romantic goal to his ass-rape-threat ("I'll fuck you 'til you love me, faggot") suggests that the endpoint of his courtship is a civil partnership.</div>
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But, the issue here is confusion: the relationships are not structured so that the presumed heterosexuality of the participants makes them unwitting subjects to the gay (Morrissey's) gaze, or that the object of derision is not the overdetermined sexuality of Yolandi Visser with her butterflies and Ninja with his scorpions and worms; this is a completely messed up video (note that the lyrics are messed up also along racial lines: "All hail the great white ninja" becomes "Is it real? No it's just a big black joke"). </div>
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Die Antwoord have a strange relationship with the extravagance of comedy; they pare down what might be exploited, even as they burst the confines with preposterous, exuberant excess: their aesthetic is like a portrait where the eyes and nose are caricatured while the mouth and chin and forehead are sketched in with a few life-like lines. Are they comic or not, which part is satirical and which is not, when do they move through time to evolve from the ironic to the post-ironic? <i>Fok Julle Naaiers</i> is roiling with sexual confusion, sexual masquerade, strutting performance, which does not coalesce into a single bubble that can then burst into a flamboyant punchline where desire suddenly becomes a real possibility (this is the familiar and pleasant narrative of tension and release in comedy, as when the sexual tension of flirtation - shivering with delighted but awkward uncertainty and thrust into the open only with the ambiguity of entendre - becomes a kiss, an embrace, a submission to certainty, the real possibility <i>par excellence</i>); no, <i>Fok Julle Naaiers</i> does not coalesce its queer and straight suds into a giant rainbow-hued bubble, popping orgasmically; it is interrupted, and then suddenly pared down into a massive back beat and a grotesque DJ making horrible, repetitive sexual threats. (It is <i>as if </i>the possibilities of rough polymorphous perversity end with a monstrous queer rape-sodomite, but note, <i>as if</i>; it remains confused, and refuses resolution).</div>
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Confusion is not the same thing as ambiguity: ambiguity can be crystal clear. Comedy frequently brings a tremendous amount of clarity to ambiguity (David Chappelle's genius in this regard is apparent <a href="http://www.comedycentral.com/videos/index.jhtml?videoId=162807">here</a>; google "racial draft" if the link doesn't work) But this is because the ambiguity is founded in comic order; when the foundation is itself confused, when something is born from within the margin between the comedic and the serious, confusion permeates the life generated, and what is produced is not a marriage of consummation and delight where the proud lovers can finally become united; what is born and bred is an unpleasant hybrid, or, as we see throughout the Die Antwoord oeuvre, a monster. (And that is the course charted by <i>Fok Julle Naaiers</i>: as that which comes from the flinty foreign margin of the comic and the serious, it is destined to the monstrosity of DJ Hi-tek).</div>
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Monstrosity reigns: the monstrous femininity of Yolanda Visser, monsters and masks; the thing that shouldn't be, desirable and terrifying, the weird comedy of horror that fundamentally repudiates what it beholds as impossible even as it threatens to take your life; a premise of gangster rap - the narrative in the lyrics is a response to a humiliation, a "look at me" reversal of fortune, the fantasy of power - is distilled into a monstrous imagery of sexual taunting.</div>
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There is a strange coda. Ninja has posted a video in which he responds to potential accusations of homophobia in the track. It would seem to be a sort of repudiation, or even, as an extraneous correction, a sort of apology that refuses to apologise.</div>
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Understand this: this is not strictly a repudiation at all; it is a supplementation and an extension to <i>Fok Julle Naaiers</i>, and it is as profoundly confused as <i>Fok Julle Naaiers. </i>Ninja gives reasons for why one should not be offended. If I may paraphrase Ninja:</div>
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1) The word "faggot" is used by DJ Hi-Tek and . . . he's gay.</div>
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2) This is South African culture and we need to understand <i>Foc Julle Naaiers</i> in that context.</div>
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3) Ninja loves DJ Hi-Tek more than anybody in the world.</div>
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Let's be clear: these are very <i>bad</i> reasons for why we should not be concerned, and though the <i>character</i> of Ninja does not know it, he tells us precisely why we should be concerned.</div>
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1 and 3) <i>My best friend is gay! And he uses the word faggot! </i> </div>
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So, the <b>main</b> problem with this pair of excuses is that DJ Hi-Tek does not exist. There is no DJ Hi-Tek (the alert reader who sent me the link suggested this as well). DJ Hi-Tek is a character, a mask, a rotating cast of characters; in <i>Enter the Ninja</i>, when the members of Die Antwoord are announced, it is Leon Botha who appears as DJ Hi-Tek.</div>
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But this is actually quite a funny. Ninja says to us with a straight face (and I paraphrase): "Saying 'faggot' can't be anti-gay because the invented character who uses the word is gay." That's quite funny. And then Ninja says (again I paraphrase): "I can't be anti-gay because my very best friend in the world, DJ Hi-Tek, is gay and I love him more than anybody", except DJ Hi-Tek does not properly exist (even in the world of Die Antwoord); so Ninja is effectively saying, "I can't be anti-gay, because my imaginary best friend is gay." </div>
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If that isn't potent enough, let's just make sure we understand the ramifications of this: every time somebody denies bigotry on account of a "best friend's" identity, we need to insert "<i>imaginary</i>" in front of "best friend". Bigots may protest and say, "no, look, he's not imaginary, I'm having drinks with him at the club tonight, come and see for yourself", at which point you explain: your bigotry makes real friendship impossible; whatever you think characterises your friendship is <i>imaginary</i>. My friend, there is no friend.</div>
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2) <i>You gotta put it into a cultural context</i>. </div>
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What makes Ninja's line of reasoning so unstable here is that he is first of all engaged in a vehemently, proudly global cross-cultural project (that is, hip hop and rap) with origins in Nigeria and Harlem, or in Havana and in Chicago, a project whose imagery can draw upon Kung Fu movies and Bruce Lee as easily as from ghettos in Detroit; the flux is apparent in <i>Fok Julle Naaiers</i> when Ninja rhymes "Zef" with "Hef". The "Ninja", who wears an American flag in the video, who is putting a Zef spin on a very American-multicultural record, says (again, I paraphrase) "you can't interpret what is being said as if we're speaking any sort of common language; it's local." What makes this particularly funny is that somebody who has ingested, metabolised, and now enacts a role, a persona (i.e., not Ninja, but Ninja who sounds like he's watched much too much MTV Cribs) is ignorant of precisely the types of influences that he suggests Americans are ignorant of when he smirks that they could "learn something" from "the dark depths of Africa": Die Antwoord, through Ninja's testimonial, is performing a phenomenal charade that shows how "cultural" arguments whitewash ethics and obligations.</div>
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The icing on the cake (and here, again, Die Antwoord tips its hand that it is engaging in comedy) is the "my nigga" spiel, as if Ninja has no idea that this has been a phenomenon (and a problem) in the United States for some decades now, as if he thinks that this is a specifically local, South African vernacular. </div>
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As Ninja shows us, culture as an excuse is no excuse. Cosmopolitanism is an ethics, not a freedom from ethics.</div>
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The non-apologia is a comic performance, a charade so committed you can't tell where the characterisation begins and ends, and it's very serious: the line about Die Antwoord not being homophobic is, I think, uninflected with the comic subversions elsewhere in his monologue. But the highlight is the massive-dicked pod dolls, silly and droll, provocative and, for once, quite pleasing.</div>
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Comedic order is a negotiation of ambiguity (say, dignity and indignity), but its practice is disavowal (in the bottomless funnel, where it forsakes responsibility, as when - but not only when - it produces the incomplete closure of "dignity leads to indignity that leads to dignity"); at the margins, there is no recourse to disavowal ("is Die Antwoord homophobic?" is not the same question as "is Brüno homophobic?") because it trespasses on the serious, which is only serious because it is an avowal; and the negotiation is not of ambiguity, but within ambiguity. Out of this, we can extract something: my friend, there is no friend; cosmopolitanism is not a freedom from ethics, but ethics; and, crucially in Die Antwoord, that the ridiculous is monstrous because it is the spawn of the serious and the comedic. Life is not so much a joke in the humanistic, philosophical sense, as it is in the Die Antwoordian sense, a preposterous but defiantly human monstrosity; Die Antwoord is unpleasant, it does not sustain itself as <i>funny</i>, but it is comedy.*</div>
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*I could go on, but someone has entered the room, placed two gentle hands on my shoulders, is staring me in the eye, and, with licorice-scented breath is saying, "Don't. They're not going to get this far anyway. The joke's on <i>you</i>."</div>
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<br /></div>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-87218847635525479532011-11-15T21:33:00.026-05:002012-05-06T00:02:44.662-04:00Mockupy Wall StreetIt has been crushingly unsurprising to witness the rampantly dishonest, patronising, and snarky coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement(s), from the freebie rags (the AM and Metro syndicates) to the populist servants of the rich. The New York Post has been chomping at the bit, frothing over their front pages: <br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">OWS are "shits"; they're "animals". Fox Nation managed to transmit <a href="http://nation.foxnews.com/occupy-wall-street/2011/10/20/they-are-defecating-our-doorsteps">one article</a> with a story that cuts to the chase, turning them them into shitting animals:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">Even in outlets one might expect to be sympathetic, journalists and writers are straining to distance themselves from the soiled, spoiled youth. Hendrik Hertzberg ended an otherwise curious and partly sympathetic lunchtime stroll through Zuccotti Park with a <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2011/10/17/111017taco_talk_hertzberg#ixzz1bNgwttZ4">sour burp of condescension</a>:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">In the next week's <i>New Yorker</i>, Lizzie Widdicombe <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2011/10/24/111024ta_talk_widdicombe">made frequent use</a> of cutesy brackets in her bubbly trip to a cartoon Zuccotti Park. Yes, Lizzie, it <i>is</i> "erroneous" to say that Michael Bloomberg is the richest man in the United States; <a href="http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/list/">he's actually the <i>second</i> richest man in New York, and only the <i>twelfth</i> richest man in the United States.</a> </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">At 1am this morning, Mayor Bloomberg, the second richest man in New York, and only the twelfth richest man in the United States, had his police sweep through and "clear" the park. His primary reason for doing this? Public Health! </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">It was a Public Health Intervention! </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><a href="http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Mayor-Bloomberg-Occupy-Wall-Street-Zuccotti-Press-Media--133921488.html">According to Gabe Pressman</a>, of NBC, Mayor Bloomberg:</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">did the right thing [. . .] The mayor had to balance the rights of free speech and free assembly guaranteed by the First Amendment with the need to protect public health and safety.</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Bloomberg is not alone, of course, in focusing on the serious public health problems posed by the Occupiers. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/10/occupy-san-francisco-tense-standoff-but-police-avoid-mass-arrests.html">In San Francisco:</a></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">A tense standoff continued Thursday morning between San Francisco police and Occupy San Francisco protesters. Police have called on the protesters to leave Justin Herman Plaza, saying the camps pose a threat to public health.</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">The profound concerns about public health had been simmering in the media; <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-20126396-10391704/occupy-protests-spark-public-health-fears/">here's</a> a report from CBS:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;"></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">"Occupy protests spark public health fears</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">by David W. Freeman Topics: News, Disease.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">I love it! Look next to the byline: file this under "Topics: News, Disease."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;">It is, however, most encouraging that there has been a profound, perplexed interest in public health, and, in particular, the public health hazards of the Occupy movement. The OWS message was something vague and hippyish, fundamentally inconsequential and pie-in-the-sky, about the problem of wealth disparities in society, which, we know, has nothing to do with public health. The only public health problem is the flourishing of acne across unwashed faces, mildew in cheap tents, and, let's face it, chlamydia. You don't think they're just banging <i>drums</i> all night, do you?</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;">But, since we're on the topic, do you mind if I bore you for a moment? I mean, it's not really that important, and it's going to involve graphs. Quite a lot of them. But, well, maybe . . . Come with me. I'm inviting you to follow me on a polygraphic spree. You're about to get more graph than Agassi on his anniversary. You'll discover there <i>is</i> such a thing as the graphalo! </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;">So here's a graph. It shows the percentage change in after-tax income from 1979-2007. What you see is that between 1979 and 2007, the rich really got richer; and if you account for increases in costs (of education, for example), you might even argue that the poor got poorer with the barely-perceptible rise of income. There wasn't much trickle-down, but you need to give it <i>time</i>. And this has nothing to do with public health.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1px;"><img height="347" id="il_fi" src="http://currydemocrats.org/in_perspective/income_gains.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px;" width="450" /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">Here's another graph, but instead of oblong, phallic bars jutting priapically into the air, it uses a more homely visual imagery, almost a nostalgic, cinnamon-scented image. It's the </span></div>
<img align="right" alt="" src="http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms//6-25-10inc-rev7-9-10-f3.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(206, 207, 209); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-left-color: rgb(206, 207, 209); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(206, 207, 209); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-top-color: rgb(206, 207, 209); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 20px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 5px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 5px; padding-right: 5px; padding-top: 5px;" /><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">American Pie chart. It shows how the top 5% and 1% had the biggest slices of the after-tax income pie in 1979, but they had to make do with less than half the pie; by 2007, the richest 5% now eat more than half of the income pie. The richest 1% really take the heftiest slice, though the 2-5% won't be leaving the table empty-stomached.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #434749; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #434749; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">Now, remember, we're really concerned about public health, which is why we support removing the bad-breathed whiners of the Occupy movement from their "camping" and "doorstep defecating" activities, but we should congratulate them on their way out for having done one thing: they brought the issue of wealth disparities to light, because nobody ever really thought that was important. So, good job! But now, as a public health nuisance, like scabies, bed bugs, or santorum on the sheets, they've got to go, because what they said had no relevance to, I don't know, <i>public health</i>? Because remember, we're really concerned with public health.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">Here's another graph. It shows the average lifespan in New York City between 1990 and 2001. The top line, the people who are living the longest, live in the highest income neighborhoods. The people living not so long in the line below them live in moderate income neighborhoods. And the people living less long in the line below <i>them</i> live in a poor neighborhoods. The suckers at the bottom, living a lot fewer years, live in the poorest neighborhoods. (For an updated version of this graph, <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/downloads/pdf/episrv/disparitiesone.pdf">here's a pdf</a> published in 2010 by the NYC gov on health disparities in NYC) </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: medium; line-height: 19px;"><a class="rg_hl" href="http://www.google.com/imgres?q=life+expectancy+new+york+city&um=1&hl=en&client=safari&sa=N&rls=en&biw=1235&bih=702&tbm=isch&tbnid=uys6Gvpge3kBKM:&imgrefurl=http://www.nyrealestatelawblog.com/2010/02/whats_the_health_of_new_york_c.html&docid=1ZNtKzNqmE8SnM&itg=1&imgurl=http://www.nyrealestatelawblog.com/nyc_life_expectancy_0210_nyreblog_com_.gif&w=434&h=392&ei=xk_DTr2SOqjn0QG5x431Dg&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=968&vpy=158&dur=482&hovh=157&hovw=183&tx=104&ty=111&sig=110574915370746826919&page=1&tbnh=154&tbnw=180&start=0&ndsp=15&ved=1t:429,r:4,s:0" id="rg_hl" style="color: #1122cc; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 213px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium; position: relative; text-decoration: none; width: 236px;"><img alt="" class="rg_hi" height="213" id="rg_hi" 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" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; display: block; height: 213px; margin-bottom: 4px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; width: 236px;" width="236" /></a></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">It's nice that they're all going up, but . . . </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Jeez. Those lines aren't all that close, when you consider that the integers between them are <i>years</i>. Huh. </span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Here's another graph, a more recent one (get it at the link above). It shows pretty much the same thing: if you live in a wealthier neighborhood, you live longer. <i>Years </i>longer. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Except this next graph carves it up by race. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;"><img src="webkit-fake-url://095063AE-6D70-4D20-B953-110C33D7CC97/image.tiff" /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">If you can't see it: it shows that people who live in wealthier neighborhoods, live longer. But race matters. In how long you live on average. By <i>years</i>. Blacks in a wealthier neighborhood live longer than blacks in an impoverished neighborhood, but blacks in a wealthier neighborhood don't live as long as whites (or hispanics or asians, who seem to be doing just peachy) in poor neighborhoods. What's going on here? You might start thinking that wealth disparities have something to do with public health, and health disparities, and shit like how long people actually get to live.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">Here's another set of graphs, from Scotland. This was published in the <a href="http://www.bmj.com/content/323/7319/967.short">British Medical Journal</a>, by the wonderfully-named Chalmers and Capewell, sort of the Gilbert and George of public health epidemiology. And what Chalmers and Capewell show is really rather astounding. They followed a cohort of Scots born in 1920 and alive in the year 1974, through to 1997, and they recorded how everybody died. Take a look at these graphs. They compared the most deprived fifth (on the right) to the least deprived fifth (on the left); the upper pair is men, the lower pair is women. What do you see?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif, helvetica, arial; line-height: 10px;"><a class="colorbox fragment-images initColorbox-processed cboxElement" href="http://www.bmj.com/highwire/filestream/426646/field_highwire_fragment_image_l/0/F1.medium.gif" rel="gallery-fragment-images" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: #006990; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Fig 1"><img src="http://www.bmj.com/highwire/filestream/426646/field_highwire_fragment_image_m/0/F1.medium.gif" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif, helvetica, arial; line-height: 10px;"><a class="colorbox fragment-images initColorbox-processed cboxElement" href="http://www.bmj.com/highwire/filestream/426664/field_highwire_fragment_image_l/0/F2.medium.gif" rel="gallery-fragment-images" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; color: magenta; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Fig 2"><img src="http://www.bmj.com/highwire/filestream/426664/field_highwire_fragment_image_m/0/F2.medium.gif" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" /></a></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;">Three things. The most deprived fifth die <i>more</i>. The pattern is the same for men and women. And here's the point Chalmers and Capewell really make: the most deprived group die more of <i>everything</i>. It's not just one thing that nails them. They die more of <i>all of it</i>.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">So in New York and in Scotland, in different time periods, taking into account race and gender, you're finding that your station in life can make the difference in years of life? </span><span class="Apple-style-span"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">You might begin to think that wealth disparities play a role in health disparities and, I don't know, <i>dying</i>. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman';">Of course, Bloomberg is <i>profoundly</i> concerned about public health, sending in an armed, paramilitary police force to deal with the public health menace of defecating, scruffy protesters; but we would expect nothing less from a man honoured in the field of public health:</span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'times new roman'; font-size: 100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1px;"><img height="320" id="il_fi" src="http://www.cjpvfd.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/jhsph-logo.jpeg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px;" width="320" /></span></span></div>
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</div>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-68140914587548199762011-10-21T12:35:00.008-04:002012-05-06T00:03:03.403-04:00The Yankee Fan with the Golden Gun<div>
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@stevenpoole <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/stevenpoole/status/127072364168093696">asked a really good question</a>:</div>
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What exactly is the "news value" of a picture of a dead body that is not already contained in the information that said person is dead?</div>
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Do such images add "news value" to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/world/africa/qaddafi-is-killed-as-libyan-forces-take-surt.html?_r=1">descriptions</a> like:</div>
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<blockquote>
In a cellphone video that went viral on the Internet, the deposed Libyan leader is seen splayed on the hood of a truck and then stumbling amid a frenzied crowd, seemingly begging for mercy. He is next seen on the ground, with fighters grabbing his hair. Blood pours down his head, drenching his golden brown khakis, as the crowd shouts, “God is great!”</blockquote>
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When the news first came out about Gaddafi's execution, the photographs and video images did - not despite, but as evidence for, the analyses of Barthes and Sontag - provide a sense of confirmation, but this sense of confirmation may be adding something other than what I would understand by "news value"; its value lies elsewhere. </div>
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Another question to ask, clearly the follow-up to @stevenpoole's, is how those images are being used. What exactly <i>is</i> the value? </div>
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Clips of video footage shown on the <i>Guardian</i> and elsewhere (at various points, in various places, it's hard to keep up) stopped short of including all the original footage: someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the <i>Guardian</i>, with its familiar "Guardian video" entry graphics, did not show the part of the video where it was possible to see Gaddafi's hair being yanked. I raise this issue because in the <i>Guardian</i> footage I saw, it was not noted that this was an excerpt of a longer video: what was the reason for showing only a portion of it? What informed the decision to use only part of the footage? Were the considerations aesthetic, ethical, pragmatic? Legal? (Did they not have the right to show all of it?) That there are these multiple angles - aesthetic, ethical, pragmatic, legal - should not come as a surprise: that's what values are.</div>
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Elsewhere, bloody images were not being withheld. Today's <i>New York Post</i> is running an incredible front page. The headline roars, <i>Khadafy Killed By Yankee Fan</i>.</div>
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On the one hand, it's outrageously funny as grandstanding parochialism; and the weirdness of the parochialism is that it's not as if the New York Yankees are, I don't know, the Minot Minnows or the Charlottesville Festoons. Like Manchester United, the Yankees are a global fixture; they are exported pre-packaged in their pinstripes, their logo is familiar like Coca Cola or McDonalds, they rank up there with Elvis and Marilyn Monroe as figures in (and of) the American imagination. It is not evident that the man with the golden gun is a Yankees fan who avidly follows the ERA and batting averages of the Bronx Bombers, or even that he was the one who actually killed Gaddafi, but the image is a powerful one: a Yankees cap is a floating signifier of American globalisation, and the amazing thing about floating signifiers is where they come to rest. When I was living briefly in Calcutta, my commute took me under a billboard that read, "When Calcutta Speaks, the World Listens." And I used to think, "But that's not really true, is it?" A similar billboard in Times Square would not be true either - except that it would be sort of true?</div>
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The subheading on the front page is: <i>Gunman had more hits than A-rod</i>. </div>
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The extension of the headline into a far more local joke about a particular player can unite Yankees fans and those who hate the Yankees with a shared smile of disdain for Alex Rodriguez, inflected with misery and <i>schadenfreude</i>, respectively; but of course, celebrating the death of a dictator in this way is not merely a chance to reflect upon sporting loyalties or to mock a celebrity (and former beau of Kate Hudson and Cameron Diaz, and possibly Madonna), but is a comic nail hammered into the dictator's coffin, a bruising posthumous psychic swipe to add to the indignities and brutality of his death. </div>
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One might argue that what is at stake in this coy comedy of New York parochialism is the ghoulish pleasure to be had in a man's murder. But reducing the front page to a question of ethics risks missing a few points - which is not to say that ethical questions are irrelevant; not at all. It's how other values are being imported into, and with, the image. </div>
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First, as evidenced by the almost bizarre way in which this event is being reinterpreted as local news, there are local political values. This cover salves two tender Right Wing anxieties. So, the United States was not active enough in the liberation of Libya, content to "<a href="http://politics.foxnews.mobi/quickPage.html?page=23888&external=1092640.proteus.fma">lead from behind</a>" (see, for example, <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/262931/libya-france-takes-lead-conrad-black?page=2">here</a>)? Well, it was the Bronx Bombers, not French bombers, who sealed the deal. And does Obama "<a href="http://news.yahoo.com/does-liberation-libya-mean-credit-president-obama-153700391.html">deserve credit</a>" for this? No, the symbolic nexus of this act, the logo stamped across the execution, is not Barack's signature, it's the blue-blooded American New York Yankees. (One could even go a step further - I would be willing to do so - and point out that the additional dismissive contempt for A-Rod, a weird metonymy, might be tweaking at his "other" roots, as a Dominican, and, therefore, obliquely, metonymically, at Obama).</div>
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Second, and here we return to another comedy in the <i>New York Post</i> cover: the image of Gaddafi with his long, pallid face, his unruly, frizzy hair, and his blood-smeared mouth, is that of the clown. </div>
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The man already had a comic face, elongated and droopy - </div>
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- and with dictatorial flamboyance, he often cut a cartoonish figure - </div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: medium; line-height: 19px;"><a class="rg_hl" href="http://www.google.ca/imgres?q=gaddafi&um=1&hl=en&client=safari&sa=N&rls=en&biw=1235&bih=702&tbm=isch&tbnid=TvaCJA2HysMKlM:&imgrefurl=http://www.topnews.in/law/region/brussels%3Fpage%3D3&docid=ONUADY8voX4XiM&imgurl=http://www.topnews.in/law/files/muammar-gaddafi_23.jpg&w=460&h=276&ei=e_GhTv2aK4ns0gHv4LCPBQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=106&vpy=424&dur=308&hovh=166&hovw=256&tx=208&ty=107&sig=113051758756567087374&page=2&tbnh=154&tbnw=206&start=18&ndsp=18&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:18" id="rg_hl" style="color: #1122cc; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 174px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; outline-style: none; outline-width: medium; position: relative; text-decoration: none; width: 290px;"><img alt="" class="rg_hi" height="174" id="rg_hi" src="http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR1XZIPczoadi3s-M_Z6GZrId-iK0SM0n4RmUtQC03o_A9yy3f_mA" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; display: block; height: 174px; margin-bottom: 4px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; width: 290px;" width="290" /></a></span></div>
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Foucault and Zizek both considered why totalitarians are so often comic figures: it is a complete manifestation of power, not just because comic flamboyance treats every rule as potentially arbitrary and simultaneously locates the control over how and when the rule will become arbitrary in the figure of the comedian, but also as a message: <i>I am so powerful, I don't even need to pretend to be dignified</i>. In this light, it is no wonder that Blair's prissy but articulate and impassioned fretting was overshadowed by the mental doodlings of the "Texan" buffoon (in the oozing caramel-coloured synthetic paste that is <i>Love Actually</i>, the fantasy encounter between Hugh Blair Grant and Billy Bob Bush Thornton utterly misses this point). And so the <i>Post</i>'s picture arrives as a visual epitaph; it is at once the realisation and the culmination of the fool. That's the story. Read it and gloat.</div>
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<br /></div>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-4011717970702519742011-10-20T00:23:00.003-04:002012-05-06T00:03:22.890-04:00Outer Mong-don't-go-thereOkay, so my arm was twisted by an alert reader, I'll enter the fray.<br />
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Apparently, twitter has been a-flutter after Ricky Gervais tweeted a series of jokes in which he plays with the word "mong." Previously, we dealt with profoundly mean-spirited, nasty, spiteful jokes about disability (<a href="http://privatematters4publicthings.blogspot.com/2011/04/ofcom.html">Ofcom</a> and <a href="http://privatematters4publicthings.blogspot.com/2011/04/about-boy.html">About A Boy</a>), but this has a different quality to it.</div>
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As I'm sure you all know, "mong" is a term of derision for people with mental retardation, especially people with Down Syndrome. The "stigmata" of Down Syndrome can include macroglossia (a big tongue, hence elegant impersonations that involve putting your tongue under your lower lip and going "nhhhuhhhh"), the rather more imaginatively-named "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transverse_palmar_crease">simian crease</a>" ("get your simian crease off of me, you damned dirty ape"), and, of course, prominent <a href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/symptoms/epicanthal-folds/overview.html">epicanthal folds</a>, which spurred the popularisation of the term "mongoloid", cleverly contracted to "mong". There is nothing affectionate or endearing about the word "mong"; it's a crass and pejorative diminutive of a weirdly racist characterisation of a feature associated with a number of conditions associated with mental retardation. A whole history of dismissive, contemptuous, belittling, and arrogantly misconstrued cruelty is captured in that term.<br />
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But then isn't there something affectionate and endearing to be found when we recall the foibles and stupidities and cruelties of childhood? We might call it "sentimentality" when it is handled crassly, but when it is handled well - think Mark Twain - something human can be extracted from those foibles, stupidities, and cruelties; to call it "innocence" is just lazy moralising; instead, we might look back at how we moved through the world blinking and opening and closing our eyes, and, in the retrospective impermanence that lacquers the permanence of youth as something antique and precious, we might realise that because we were wrong and wrong-headed and yet still loved the world and wanted more of it, there is the possibility of forgiveness. Or, to put it another way (which I must do, because my readership is largely limited to simpletons and cretins): forgiveness is possible because we forgive ourselves for acting badly, but the impulse for forgiveness needs to find purchase in the love and liveliness that was bound up in the foibles, stupidities and cruelties, allowing us to surpass those foibles, stupidities and cruelties.</div>
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So there is, in Ricky Gervais tweets about mongs, something archaic, intentionally old-fashioned, and even nostalgic; he's playing with a term that has (<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/joepublic/2011/oct/19/ricky-gervais-mong-twitter?newsfeed=true">for very good reason</a>) gone out of fashion. He's not approaching it with sentimentality, for which we can be <i>very</i> grateful; he's not approaching it with sensitivity, and, again, for that we can be grateful. It's like a sore in the cultural mouth that he is tonguing, probing, he's seeing what sort of jets of pain he can generate and locate, and it's not unpleasurable, and it's a way of being alive in the moment; that's an important type of comedy. </div>
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That would be my defence. And, even recognising what is being packaged in that term, I would stand by it. I would argue it further if I had to. I would not say that it somehow vindicates or expunges the history of dismissive, contemptuous, belittling, and arrogantly misconstrued cruelty captured in that term, but also that the comedy is not a simple extension and revivification of that history, that it does something more complicated, and valuable.</div>
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Unfortunately, I could not call Gervais up as a witness in support of my defence. Rather, Gervais seems to be taking a truly boring, quasi-empiricist stance in response to the furore. He apparently thinks that the word no longer has the historical significance that actually gives his jokes any frisson, and in fact, he tweets quite the opposite, saying that he has been using a different contemporary meaning of the word, as if he brushed his teeth with a magic toothbrush and scoured away any historical residue in the words coming out of his mouth. He <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/rickygervais/status/125635506351505408">tweeted</a>: </div>
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Well done everyone who pointed out that Mong USED to be a derogatory term for DS Gay USED to mean happy. Words change. Get over it.</blockquote>
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<a href="http://www.richardherring.com/warmingup/?id=3269">Richard Herring</a> responds:</div>
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Obviously some people picked him up on it as he tweeted "Just to clarify for uptight people stuck in the past. The word Mong means Downs syndrome about as much as the word Gay means happy." He didn't care to clarify what it does now mean and the accompanying pictures made it easy to assume that it had been broadened out to mean any disabled person. He added "ie I never use the word Mong to mean anything to do with Downs Syndrome. Just like I never use the word cunt to female genitalia." So I guess he means that the word "mong" has just become short hand for idiot. I must have missed that meeting.</blockquote>
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Quite. </div>
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Others have hopped on the "politically correct" bandwagon. I won't tire you, or myself, with a diatribe against the concept of "political correctness", except that there's this tiresome line of thinking that supposes the purpose of comedy is to put some sand in the political vaseline, that it's okay to be mean-spirited because it's an affront to certain political sensibilities, and yadda yadda (see, for example, <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100112084/ricky-gervais-and-mong-if-its-politically-correct-to-think-its-bullying-then-im-politically-correct/">this, in the Tonedeafegraph</a>, which actually includes Stewart Lee's <i>definitive</i> response to any lingering question of "political correctness"). Gervais fuels the popping and fizzing embers of the great PC conflagration, <a href="http://www.contactmusic.com/news/ricky-gervais-slams-critics-over-offensive-tweets_1251702">moaning</a>:</div>
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The humourless PC brigade have been out in force trying to influence the vote with ill informed negative comments... thanks for the support as others wilfully misunderstand to justify their point.</blockquote>
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It's not just the clodding, lumbering swipe at the "humourless PC brigade" but the lipglossy gratitude for support, because, um, "others wilfully misunderstand to justify their point." Yes, but actually comedy could be <i>defined</i> as wilfully misunderstanding life in order to justify a point. That's what comedy <i>is</i>. It's a wild, witty compaction of misunderstandings about life that communicate something vivid, the way a caricature misunderstands a face in order to justify a characteristic, the way jokes misunderstand social and cognitive complexities in order to justify a point about a way of being in the world. And so on. But, going back to "political correctness", we should remember how Stewart Lee, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2007/jan/03/comedy.television">in his magnificent piece</a> quotes Stephen Merchant at length about this topic; it is worth re-quoting at length:</div>
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Stephen Merchant, co-writer of The Office and Extras with Ricky Gervais, says: "We're endlessly cited as being non-PC, and yet we sit and agonise for ages over what we put into the scripts, and over whether our choices can be defended, both morally and intellectually," he says. "We may push things, but we're always motivated by satirical imperatives." But the duo's scripts do use non-PC language? "Yes," explains Merchant, clearly slotting back into a tramline he has had to follow many times before. "But we deal in taboos and hot areas by appearing to approach them from a non-PC standpoint, but as soon as you even introduce topics that PC has declared off limits, people assume you are trying to be dangerous and politically incorrect. Often we're all unsure of what to say, for example, in the company of someone who is disabled. These are areas ripe for comedy because of social anxiety, not because the subject itself is intrinsically funny. A joke about race, and about how we react to race, is not necessarily a racist joke. That is fundamental. Political correctness has made the world better for those who might otherwise have been unfairly marginalised, but there is the problem of the idea that you cannot discuss different areas for fear of being politically incorrect."</blockquote>
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Gervais is caught up in the roiling snippets of twitter, and is responding with tweets: there have been a great many brilliant, funny tweets, but compare his responses to Merchant's and you <i>begin</i> to see the limitations of the form. Comedy is all about reflexes, but beware reflexive responses to comedy. Especially in tweet form.</div>
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Now, one of the things I love about Merchant's quote is its concession to confusion; another is how he is committed to the integrity of comedy. One Gervais tweet is "<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/15365744">Two mongs don't make a right</a>". Is there, as Merchant puts it, a satirical imperative? Can we agonise over this to see whether it is morally and intellectually justified? Actually, yes and yes. The satirical imperative is precisely how two mongs can make a right, that the current use of "mong" and its defunct-but-alive meaning, two mongs, make a satirical right: the right to throb for a moment with a regretted memory, accompanied by the flush of pleasure that comes from recalling transgressions. And can we not agonise over the connections being forged here, "connections" that are not so much links as unformed nuggets of shared meaning: the relationship between derogatory terms and rights, a weird relationship where the right not to be called a derogatory name becomes established at which point that derogatory name becomes permissible again (think "gay" - precisely the word Gervais comes up in his denunciation of this line of reasoning); the relationship between people and rights, where rights develop out of coalescing people into groups, so that while, arguably, rights are inherent to the individual, to one person, they obtain to that person because that person is perceived as belonging to a mass; and so on. There is little in this offhand pun to guide our subsequent agonies, it's a tossed-off joke, but it's not <i>nothing</i>. </div>
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It can hardly be a coincidence that this evening I've been humming Morrissey's most humanistic foray into the grotesque. That the video ends before the climax has its own resonance with the above debate:</div>
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<br /></div>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-73437673915619009412011-09-13T11:15:00.001-04:002011-09-13T11:17:51.959-04:00In the newsDoes anybody else think <a href="http://www.space.com/12915-habitable-alien-planet-hd-85512b-super-earth.html">this report</a> might be the first, innocent indication of our eventual demise?Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-33698196041836971482011-09-13T06:58:00.006-04:002011-09-13T07:09:23.616-04:00DIalects<span class="Apple-style-span">An alert reader directed me to <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/12/radio-station-grilled">this</a>, a wonderful example about the uses and abuses of language, with a very amusing core question: were they joking when they insisted that 'punani' wa</span><span><span>s a "sandwich sold locally and is made of Italian bread with cheese and tomato which is heated up"? One has to admire the several conceits in the line - the notion that it is a local custom, the concession to tenuous Italian origins in Italian bread, and the culinary explanation that it is heated up, all in all displaying a lovely ignorance of <i>panini</i>. Comedy is a wonderful guise for innocence, through uncertainly brilliant relays of stupidity, gullibility, and distraction.</span></span>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-87630074565107286322011-09-13T00:36:00.014-04:002012-05-06T00:04:01.920-04:00Religious Fiction Double Feature<span class="Apple-style-span">I just emerged from the Film Forum, which was packed with men in their (to be generous) late thirties, with retreating hair lines and expanding waist lines (it was nice to stand out from the crowd for once), where I saw a double feature - </span>Abel Ferrara's <i>Bad Lieutenant</i> (1992) and William Friedkin's <i>Cruising</i> (1980) - <span class="Apple-style-span">that was supposed to be showing there on September 11, 2001. I considered the arbitrary significance of that fact, and it was a touching thing to replay those films (indeed, they're replaying the series that was showing then, <i>NYPD</i>). It's another New York and the same New York; both films are from a different era, somehow more in contact with each other than with us now, although that might be true of any two points in the relatively recent past; but it would be hard to imagine either film being made today, and I'm not sure that's a sign of progress. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span">I was going to dwell on these facts, which I'm sure a few of my readers would have loved, because I really don't know much about anything; but in the middle of <i>Bad Lieutenant</i>, in a sort of proxy crack-induced squealing, revolving-naked-and-flapping-my-hands high, I started imagining the film as part of my B-movie youth in much the same way as Richard O'Brien relished the B-movies of his youth, and it wasn't hard to think of the title Religious Fiction Double Feature, and then what follows sort of wrote itself in the intermission between the two films. Because it wrote itself, I don't take any responsibility for it. Blame <i>it</i>. Not me.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span"><i>Religious Fiction Double Feature</i>, to the tune of [click on it] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5MHNvOVl8Y">Science Fiction Double Feature</a>.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">Harvey Keitel was ill and couldn't get his fill</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">But he gave perps a helping hand</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">And the nun was there without her underwear</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">It went to shit when Strawberry fanned. [1]</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">There was hope in Hong Kong, Tony Wai [2] met Faye Wong</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">Then at a deadly pace, De Niro went face to face</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">And asked: are you lookin' at me?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">Dr Freud</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">Was he the killer</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">And I really got hot at how cool Uma fought</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">O-Renn Ishi and Vernita and Bill</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">Choosing pills, Neo said red, it went to his head</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">And fighting Smith used lots of skills,</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">Three years later</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span">He once was Michael</span></div>
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Wa-aa-aa-oh-oh-oh<span class="Apple-style-span"> at the late night double feature picture show (I wanna go) <div>
to the late night double feature picture show (with de Niro)</div>
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to the late night double feature picture show (in the back row)</div>
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[1] It's clearly a turning point in the film when Daryl Strawberry struck out (fanned out) at the bottom of the 9th in Game . . . 4? or was it 5?</div>
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[2] Tony Leung Chui Wei. Probably the film that least belongs here? But my favourite film ever?</div>
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</span>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-82268354219201788962011-09-11T14:12:00.012-04:002012-05-06T00:05:02.761-04:00Say what?<div>
Not having bothered to blog in a while (during which time, this blog escaped and went feral, submitting posts under its own name on bizarre astronomical and eskimo-porn web-sites; I wrangled it back this morning with the promise of cookies, and then subdued it with a benzodiazapene-spiced cracker), I had no real inclination to blog today. If I didn't have anything to say, why say it?</div>
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That was obviously not the motivating question for the syndicated cartoonists in the Sunday Newspapers, who today banded together for the first time since they met up during lunchbreak in the maths classroom, played <i>Dungeons and Dragons,</i> and wondered what girls were, a few dozen years ago. And that includes the girls. Anyway, they put out a collective commemoration, in which they pretty much had nothing to say, and said it<i> en masse</i>. </div>
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<i><b>[Note: the original version of this post snagged a few of the cartoons to discuss below, but my attempts to reproduce them in the post were foiled, as the people who produced and print these cartoons put far more energy into protecting their intellectual property than into creating, cultivating, and developing intellectual property (and if that isn't a metaphor for something, I don't know what is)]</b></i></div>
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You can read the blurb and see what the syndicated cartoonists came up with <a href="http://cartoonistsremember911.com/">here</a>. They are, in many ways, like the security apparatus around us now: if you see something, say something. (which always makes me want to call the hotline and say, "Hey, I just saw two squirrels fucking." Or "I just saw a bus almost hit a cyclist, and I was kinda rooting for the bus." Well, I <i>did</i> see something . . . ) If you see something, say something. Don't people understand that freedom is not about what you say, but about what you don't?</div>
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Anyway, the cartoonists appear to have researched the flatulently middle-brow, <i>Newsweek</i>y, <i>Time</i>y, <i>Life</i>y special edition issues and found their inspiration there. I'm not going to say that a few of the cartoons didn't get to me; a few did. It's that kind of day - a weird one, in fact, with the President's and ex-President's helicopters chopping over downtown; with the not very comforting roar of jets soon after; motorcades of state patrol police cars presumably protecting the governor at the head of their own sultry-brown parade; and, in one of those things that really does get to you, firemen walking around in their formal uniforms, probably heading downtown. </div>
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Other than the cartoons, I have avoided reading anything except <a href="http://www.salon.com/technology/ask_the_pilot/index.html?story=/tech/col/smith/2011/09/11/september_11">this</a> - from the very useful and amusing <i>Ask the Pilot</i> column at salon.com. (Oh but if you head to salon, don't read Laura Miller's execrable <i>Why haven't we seen a great 9/11 novel? </i>whose only worthwhile point is that she's sorta brave enough to dismiss Jonathan Safran Foer's 9/11 novel as "sentimental"; there was one response to Foer's contribution to the <i>New Yorker</i> editorials last week that I'm going to quote here: <i>*hurl</i> - yes, thank you, an alert reader for putting it that way) So anyway, in his piece, Patrick Smith says:</div>
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It's not the anniversary itself that irks me. The 10-year mark is -- or should be -- worthy of our solemn respects and a national timeout. But commemorating the attacks would feel a lot more meaningful if, in fact, we had ever <i>stopped</i> commemorating them. Our healing process has been never-ending -- occasionally introspective and edifying, but all too often maudlin and suffocating.</blockquote>
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Yes, quite. <i>Doonesbury </i>was, as ever, attuned to patient skepticism, in today's memorial. It's also the only cartoon that is actually almost funny.</div>
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[Let's see if this works:</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"><img id="shTopImg" src="http://cartoonistsremember911.com/wp-content/gallery/911gallery/doones37ts.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-style: initial; border-top-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; cursor: pointer; display: block; float: none; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; max-height: none; max-width: none; padding-bottom: 2px; padding-left: 2px; padding-right: 2px; padding-top: 2px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Click to Close" /></span><br />
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As one might expect, there is no lack of nationalism and jingoism in the cartoons,, but the overall impetus of the cartoons is to say 'This is how we will remember and mourn'; which is also to say: this is how we will <i>insistently </i>forget. Cartoons are good at that; it's not surprise that there are lots of cute dogs and round children, with lots of family and hugging, and blue teardrop-shaped tears. But most of it's just a kind of awkward, airy, phony. Maybe this will suffice as a relatively narratively-complex example?</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"><img id="shTopImg" src="http://cartoonistsremember911.com/wp-content/gallery/911gallery/archie37hs.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-style: initial; border-top-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; cursor: pointer; display: block; float: none; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; max-height: none; max-width: none; padding-bottom: 2px; padding-left: 2px; padding-right: 2px; padding-top: 2px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Click to Close" /></span><br />
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Yes, or maybe it is deeply meaningful and ironic? Somebody who wins after a (<i>cough, cough</i>, unnecessary) recount promptly accomplishes his number one priority, which is a form of moving commemoration for the terrorist attacks. I don't know: is that sort of a weird metaphor for George W. Bush's presidency, a reverberating, distorted echo of "Mission Accomplished", or is it chastising the entire decade for its unending, hideously violent, socially criminal, civil rights-undermining commemoration in the form of wars and and in the name of "security", by saying: "we could have had our priorities right and remembered that day efficiently and . . ." Well, I was going to say "and tastefully", but there is no way that this cartoon's memorial is tasteful. </div>
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There are, of course, a few, <i>slightly</i> subversive ones. Just about the only interesting one was this. </div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"><img id="shTopImg" src="http://cartoonistsremember911.com/wp-content/gallery/911gallery/lildogl37ts.jpg" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: transparent; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; border-bottom-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); border-left-style: solid; border-left-width: 1px; border-right-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); border-right-style: solid; border-right-width: 1px; border-style: initial; border-top-color: rgb(85, 85, 85); border-top-style: solid; border-top-width: 1px; cursor: pointer; display: block; float: none; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; max-height: none; max-width: none; padding-bottom: 2px; padding-left: 2px; padding-right: 2px; padding-top: 2px; vertical-align: baseline;" title="Click to Close" /></span><br />
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It reminded me of <i>Slaughterhouse Five</i>, when time goes backwards, and the airplanes suck up the bombs that fell on the city, return them to the hangar, where they are shipped back to the factory, where women unmake them. In this peaceful cartoon about nature, there are a number of truly shocking repressions necessary to make it work, but at the end, the image is quite a haunting one. A terrible <i>if only</i>. Its story is a weird, reversed doppelgänger to history, suggesting restoration, memorialisation in the form of renewal, the gentle return to the order of things; the images themselves are a sort of natural imagining of the most 'unnatural' of sites (a city skyline); and there was always that strange doubling in the twin towers themselves. (I could linger on this cartoon: for all the startling unexpectedness of the lightning strikes in panel three, the cartoon gives a whole panel to rumbling, thunderous forebodings: how many other representations or editorials or discussions give a full and equal fifth of their space to the reminder that the attacks did not come out of nowhere? Yes, we know, 'bin Laden determined to strike' - but that has become a footnote, not an equal fifth of the usual story).</div>
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I suppose I should end this blog by objecting to the paucity of jokes in these cartoons, by objecting to the complete lack of any sick or transgressive comedy: but, remember, we're talking about the daily syndicated cartoonists. These men and women are the doodling scribes of the media at is most mediocre; some are better than others, some, like simperingly outraged, right-whinge, battling """Political Correctness""" <i>Mallard Fillmore</i>, are worse, but really, what would you expect? </div>
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And in some ways, that's the very worst thing to be thinking on this day, isn't. What would you expect? What <i>did</i> you expect? You expected something else? </div>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-30660195363931330702011-07-30T22:57:00.003-04:002011-07-30T23:05:05.530-04:00Sunday RecommendationIt is looking increasingly unlikely that I will complete my <i>Hall Pass</i> analysis before this blog - rather crassly in my opinion - goes on vacation again, this time not for sordid adventures but because it wants to spend some time "meditating" and so will be in a secluded spa on a mountaintop somewhere, drinking rainwater and communing with itself. No doubt it will return cleansed, emptied, and, I'm sure, will consist only of entries about new vegan recipes and self-purification rituals. <i>Fucking blogs</i>. <div><br /></div><div> However, I would like to recommend <i>Hall Pass</i> and <i>Friends With Benefits</i>, as I hope to deal with these in the near future, providing, of course, this blog is not devoted to mantras and ecstatic reports about how it is now having the best sex of its life with some holistic homeopathic blog, <i>without even reaching orgasm</i>.</div>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-58456448325569152222011-07-29T10:49:00.001-04:002012-05-06T00:05:30.589-04:00Making a Good ExpressionA very alert reader e-mailed me <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=j8PGBnNmPgk">this</a>, asking "Why are impressions funny? Don't they show us things we already know?" And I was all like "<i>Are you e-mailin' me? Are you e-mailin' me? 'Cause I don't see nobody else in your 'sent to' line</i>" and then I was all like [<b>in gravelly voice</b>:] "<i>Ith a wery intuhwesthing quethun.</i> [<b>stroke chin with back of forefingers</b>]<i> Makel, what do you think? Thud we ask Fweddoh?" </i>and then I left work, wondering what <i>is</i> so funny about impressions, and was almost hit by a car in the street, and I was all like "<i>I'm walkin' here, I'm walkin'</i> <span style="font-style: italic;">here</span>", and then <i>I took the train home and it was running late but I did eventually get home.</i><br />
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[That last bit should be read as though it was being said by George from Gilbert and George.]<br />
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In response to the alert reader, I would like to address the questions in a public forum. I've got a few ideas about why impressions are funny, which are of no particular interest to me, but you will be blown away, thinking:<span style="font-style: italic;"> "that SW, man, what're they gonna say when this blog is gone? Are they gonna say SW was a kind man, are they gonna say he was a wise man? when this blog is gone, man, they gonna say he had plans, he had wisdom? BULLSHIT, man, am I gonna be the one who understands comedy? Look at me! WRONG! It was SW, man. It was SW."</span><br />
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So, why <i>are</i> impressions funny? And don't they just show us things we already know? You should probably make sure you've watched the link above before reading on?<br />
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Let's start with an explanation that is probably one of the less familiar why-is-something-funny theory-of-comedy arguments, but one of the most important, especially when it comes to impersonations:<br />
<b><br />1) Appreciation of comic art: </b>A good impersonation is akin to a beautiful portrait; it is an elaborate, technically-brilliant reproduction, subject to our enjoyment and appreciation. Elaine Scarry makes the point that the beautiful is that which we want to reproduce; a comic act of impersonation is both a reproduction of something exquisite and precious (the essence of a famous person, a drop of <i>eau de celebrite</i>) and, at the same time, a performance that is itself, if not quite beautiful, magnetically attractive, absorbing. Put another way: it's a pleasure to watch.</div>
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We love to attend to art, to linger with it, to stare at it and wrap our senses around it, to immerse ourselves in it a work that is both artificial and, because it is man-made, natural; this is one of the joys of comic art as well. I believe Bergson makes the point that art gives us a way to engage with something with an intensity we could not sustain otherwise. Comedy is a form of art where our appreciation is off-kiltered from the purities and sublimations of beauty to the rarefied, zorro-blades of wit that slash through the thick, drab curtain of reality and leave us with a sharp, identifiable, backlit Z. Impersonation is a vivid, startling imitation of the real, holding a mirror that is not <span style="font-style: italic;">merely</span> "warped" but is in fact <span style="font-style: italic;">carefully</span> warped; as such, comedy is the shimmering alter-ego to "realism" (which is a warped mirror where we are unable to see the warping). The mimetic qualities of impersonation belong to art, but whereas art is typically bound to an obligation to reality's relationship to beauty, comic art is bound to a different value, the obligation to be funny, which is in relationship to both reality and beauty. In plainer English, I'm arguing that funniness is the value of comic art; asking why we find impressionists funny is like asking why we find <a href="http://www.artic.edu/artaccess/AA_Impressionist/pages/IMP_4_lg.shtml">impressionists </a>beautiful.<br />
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The alert reader who raised this question found an act that illustrates a view of impersonation as a relation to art and performance in so far as the impression is, of course, a series of brilliantly-rendered portraits painted against the canvas of high art itself. It's <i>Shakespeare</i>, FFS. Clarence, of all people! Who isn't delighted that, after all these long centuries, somebody has finally found a way to make Clarence <i>interesting</i>!</div>
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And should you have any interest in another example of an impersonation rendered against a work of art, I would recommend <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glzkWmJgCgY">this piece</a>, an impersonation of a performance artist against another artist's song. In <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLZELQVUT7A">this performance</a>, the very same act becomes a generous and lovely dialogue between the Comic and the Beautiful (if only the directors of the show had any idea how to <i>film </i>it, fucking morons).</div>
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<b>2) Incongruity: </b>A much less elaborate answer can be found in two very familiar theories of comedy. The first is, of course, incongruity. Where there is comedy, there is incongruity. (Please note, for the record, I'm not presenting the many arguments against any of these theories; I'm just proposing possible answers, or facets of answers, to the alert reader's questions). In this case, the unexpected appearance of someone's voice, mannerisms, and person in <i>another </i>person (the impressionist) is incongruous and funny; of course, incongruity theorists should be forced, preferably at gunpoint, to acknowledge that the key is not "incongruity" but a relationship established between congruity and incongruity, as we see in impressionism where there is a delicious balance of incongruity (difference) and congruity (similarity), which is put to dramatic work - here most obviously in a) having mostly non-Shakespearean stars perform the role of Clarence and b) using multiple different voices for a single monologue.<br />
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<b>3) Domination and Superiority. </b>Another major theory of comedy comes at the intersection of the Hobbesian Superiority Theory and the Freudian Hostility Theory. The basic premise of both is that comedy <i>involves </i>a <i>socially-acceptable</i> <i>expression </i>of <i>superiority</i>, <i>dominance</i>,<i>hostility</i>. Those of you with even a scrap of intellectual integrity (about 12% of my readership) should be aware that the words in this very brief synopsis are vastly complicated: To say that Freud's argument can be distilled into "comedy lets us say rude things we couldn't otherwise say" is pretty much the same as saying that a plastic bottle of spring water is pretty much the same as a bottle of absinthe. They have much in common, but. . . In any case, impressionism is nicely attuned to these arguments about comedy.</div>
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Consider, in the alert reader's example, how most of the impressions are of people who are<span style="font-style: italic;">reciting</span> but probably not <span style="font-style: italic;">understanding</span> Shakespeare. Part of the comedy comes in the unlikelihood of these goons playing Clarence.</div>
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On a slightly suppler note, one might point out that impressions are a form of performance where the actor does not perform a role, but performs a person: somebody else is captured in the caricature, immediately belittled, for if every person's every moment could barely be contained in a ten-volume novel written by somebody with the observational skills and kinetic literary genius of Proust, Joyce, and Hollinghurst combined, so complex and rich and <span style="font-style: italic;">impossible</span>is the human, what does it mean that in two squinting, drawling seconds you've represented George W. Bush?</div>
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<b>4) The machine-like. </b>This is a favourite rationale for laughter from Bergson, who spotted how much laughter we derive from unadaptive, inflexible characteristics, when, as he put it, the mechanical is encrusted on the living.</div>
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An impression strips something mechanical, rigid and <span style="font-style: italic;">persistent</span> from a person and reproduces it as a sort of mask over the impressionist. We find it amusing that, in an impression, we have identified something that endures and persists in a celebrity and which is reproducible: their identity is not something that is adaptive and flexible, but is something rote, machine-like. Despite playing the role of poor Clarence in <i>Richard III</i>, each person portrayed by the impressionist is identifiable not just from his voice but from his pauses and mannerisms; the voice, the pauses and the mannerisms are not there because they are shadings of the character of Clarence but because they endure <i>despite </i>playing Clarence - whether it is Allen's fluster or Schwarzenegger's accent or Clooney's pauses. The celebrities are, in a way, machine-like, their "personalities" are rigid and inflexible; their personae are not personal relationships to the world but psychic marionettes, which can be made to dance any time, any where.</div>
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<b>5) Quotation. </b>All of the above arguments are pretty good ones, but there are two more points to be made right now.</div>
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The first is that the impersonation, often through mechanisms described above, is an insistence on the ambiguity of identity. Had the alert reader not written the questions to me in an e-mail, had the reader spoken it, it would have probably come out like this:</div>
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You know, like, whaddabout, um, why are impressions funny, bing-bing, oh yearh? And aren't they familiar - hey is that a dildo in that shop window? – um, yearh, cause an impression is something we've already seen - oh no, it’s not a dildo, it’s a mannikin’s arm, I thought it was a dildo – so could you tell me why impressions are funny? Do you think I could design and sell a dildo shaped like a mannikin’s arm?</blockquote>
In this we have the power of voice, the signature appended to everything we say, the unique soundprint in the whorls of intonation and the curls of accentuation; the impression is an act of exquisite forgery, taking the uniqueness of identity as the substrate for its mockery and its reproduction.</div>
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The ambiguity is, if you will, an extreme or radical one. After all, the person is at once recognisable as present <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> as absent, an existential dualism in the performance that we can relish: that is Schwarzenegger where there is no Schwarzenegger. (This ambiguity plays out in all the different rationales above; for example: the performance is a performance that can be appreciated as a performance or as a parody of a performance; there are incongruities, but also congruities; there is hostility, but also affection, there is the possibility of triumph as well as degradation; the very presumed inflexibility and endurance of the characteristic may be a form of adaptation and survival itself, proving that instead of being machine-like, it is immensely mobile and responsive - even as it is not . . .)</div>
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And, derived from this, we can re-think the alert reader's question: "Don't they show us things we already know?" When somebody, I forget who, says there's no such thing as a new joke, he's making a much smarter point than the one he thinks he's making: comedy is a play on recognition, therefore always showing us things we already know, even as there is a twist, an ambiguity that leads us to believe we don't already know it. An impersonation invites us to recognise someone else in the person of another; it's a phenomenal trick, quoting a persona, citing a character, while playing in the carefully-crafted space between recognition and the dissonances of ambiguity. Kurt Vonnegut says that the great thing about a joke is not that jokes make us think but that when the punchline comes we are relieved of the burden of thinking. We struggle, in a joke, to think, to understand, to recognise, and then suddenly we're given the punchline, we get it, and we recognise it, and there's no more work to be had. I happen to think that Vonnegut's comment about jokes relieving us from thinking is a joke in itself, but it's useful here. And I would add one small caveat: there are moments in that performance where Clarence comes alive in an interesting way, where the characterisation of the impersonation and Clarence just clicks. Surely, then, almost against our wills, we've seen and learned something new?</div>
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<br /></div>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-81188023323370363312011-07-28T10:34:00.008-04:002011-07-28T11:32:14.302-04:00A Light That's Going OutHappiness is always the same, but there are an infinite number of ways of being unhappy. While that's not <i>quite </i>an original thought, I was reminded today of another way of being unhappy; it's not a sorrowful feeling, it's not melancholic, it's not the dizzy nausea of loss, or a dank depression or despair, it's got nothing to do with pity or sympathy; it's much milder, much more pointless, less an <i>experience </i>of unhappiness than a sort of existential yawn that somehow <i>aches</i>. At what point does one stop being a fan and cut those precious, invisible strands of devotion and dedication and admiration that bind you to somebody from afar? What does it even <i>mean </i>to stop being a fan? Is there a point where someone's actions so influence you that you're turned off by their art as well? I'm not talking about those avid watercolourists who face the dilemma of being great admirers of Hitler's oeuvre and yet must struggle to reconcile the art with the man; I actually don't know if such a group really exists, but I like to think that they do, and that their annual newsletter is fraught with aesthetic-ethical debates. No, it's Morrissey again, a man who would apparently now like to be both famous <i>and </i>righteous and holy. The man has rather insistently put himself into all sorts of awkward positions over the past few decades in a manner that has been reliably truculent and often associated with animal rights (although, as I'm sure everybody has noticed, there's a peculiar, irrepressible and boringly regular strand of xenophobia and racism laced in with his animal rights rhetoric); in his dotage, Morrissey has become a sort of petulant, fey version of Elizabeth Costello, but without her hesitation and, I'm sorry to say, lacking her charm.<div><br /></div><div>As an alert reader pointed out with disgust, in an e-mail poisonously titled "I've changed my verdict to guilty", and as I'm sure everybody is now aware, Morrissey compared what happened in Norway to the fast food industry; or rather, he turned the comparison on its head and said that what happened in Norway "<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/norway/8667682/Norway-shooting-timeline-of-the-worst-terrorist-atrocity-in-peacetime-Europe.html">is nothing compared to what McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Shit every day</a>". The alert reader is giving away his Morrissey tickets for the forthcoming concert; <i>sans </i>tickets, <i>sans </i>opportunity, I'm not facing a similar ethical quandary. </div><div><br /></div><div>I don't think I need to offer any incisive commentary on what Morrissey said; for a man who has long prided himself on his wit, his comment lacks any whatsoever. That his comment lacks many other things as well can be left unsaid. But he lost a lot of people who really enjoyed defending him through thick and thin; we were, in fact, a sort of subspecies, and we're fast going extinct. </div>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-59175302410914755102011-07-27T19:03:00.004-04:002011-07-27T19:10:40.982-04:00The Importance of Being SantorumAn alert reader notified me about a segue, or a sequel, to one of the great comic political bitch-slaps of modern times, Dan Savage's take-down of the puckerbutted, sweaty-browed Pennsylvania Bigot, <a href="http://www.spreadingsantorum.com/">Rick Santorum</a>, previously discussed in the blog; you <a href="http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/07/dan-savage-threatens-to-santorum-the-name-rick-too-video.php">can find the sequel here</a>. Anybody interested in the political use of language will enjoy this comic twist to a story I still find amusing; I've tried to interest some people in considering this an act of <i>speak</i>, as opposed to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Unspeak-Weapons-Message-Becomes-Reality/dp/0802118259">unspeak</a>, but they just look at me like a little part of them died when I spoke. It's not an unusual experience for me.<div><br /></div><div>Keep checking in; I promise, over the next few days, a post on impressions and at least one on <i>Hall Pass</i>. </div>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-19759521304942854582011-07-24T21:02:00.002-04:002011-07-25T07:04:32.593-04:00Not all the news this weekend was bad<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/24/gay-marriage-begins-in-ne_n_908120.html#s314807&title=Gay_Marriage">If you need to be cheered up a bit</a> . . .Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-52407440952771575762011-07-23T21:34:00.007-04:002011-07-23T21:43:32.927-04:00Sunday RecommendationsDo you ever feel jealous of the news? Anxiously protective of it, wanting to fend off the churners and the gurners, the huffingtonposts and the op-ed spewers, the twitterers and the commenters, the bloggers and - oh. Yes. Of course. It's one of those weekends; I'm not even going to name names, events, places. It's just a weekend where the news deserves to be the news.<div><br /></div><div>Anyway, here's the rec:</div><div><br /></div><div><iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/QmV6_oc2lwM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-50302456981831804432011-07-21T08:49:00.008-04:002011-07-21T09:45:37.908-04:00Summer in the City and in the CountryMy guess is that Michael Billington has made no secret throughout his career of aspiring to be one of those "national treasures" - public figures who are too prickly or intellectual to have been considered <i>attractive </i>in their early years but who, in their dotage, are generally treated in the media as though they are widely loved - and has cultivated a persona greatly attuned to achieving this status: never too supportive of the <i>avant-garde</i> to suggest radicalism and conservatively disappointed in the art of today, but with a few gentle foibles and preferences suggestive of <i>taste; </i>a generally anti-nationalist, belligerently anti-racist position with just the right touch of xenophobic snapping and loyal patriotism; grumpy enough to make the establishment suspect he really is a closet Tory.<div><br /></div><div>An alert reader directed me to his latest postprandial belch, a <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/may/27/much-ado-about-nothing-globe">review </a>of <i>Much Ado About Nothing</i>. I think the ending rather proves the point I was making above:</div><div></div><span><span><blockquote><br />But a carnivalesque evening would be better for a touch of self-restraint. In some theatres, actors play to the gallery. Here, they are in thrall to the groundlings.</blockquote></span></span><div><br /></div><div>Well, la di da. <i>Fuck the groundlings</i>! And that's just what impressed Bakhtin about the carnivalesque, isn't it? Its<i> restraint</i>.</div><div><br /></div><div>But of course, it is the beginning of Billington's review that had the alert reader's steaming to such an extent - well, I'll tell you a little secret: this alert reader <i>woke me up</i> to tell me about this review. Yes, it's true. I sleep with my readers. Not all of you, though. But you should know it's at least <i>possible</i>. In any case, this alert reader was fuming about the following:</div><div></div><blockquote><div><br /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; border-collapse: collapse; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: arial, sans-serif; "></span></div><span><span>On a chill, damp night Jeremy Herrin's production, pre-empting next week's West End version (starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate) conquered its audience. But, although Herrin's production is full of intelligent touches and neatly blends Shakespeare's Messina and Morocco, I found it hard to surrender completely to a show that contains more mugging than you'll find in Central Park on a Saturday night.</span></span><div></div></blockquote><div><br /></div><div>Graciously, we might think that Billington is making an in-joke for his New York audience, referring to (and mocking, but perhaps affectionately) the several free productions of Shakespeare in Central Park every Summer: the Public's two productions (this year, <i>Measure for Measure</i> and <i>All's Well That Ends Well</i>) at the Delacorte nestled above Turtle Pond in the centre of the park, and the <a href="http://newyorkclassical.org/whats-playing">New York Classical Theatre's</a> productions around the pond at 100th. There is quite a lot of mugging in open air theatre and there's a lot of that going on on any Saturday night in the Summer in Central Park.</div><div><br /></div><div><img src="http://newyorkclassical.org/sites/default/files/rotateImage.jpg?1309728862" /></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" >(image from newyorkclassical.org)</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Less graciously, if we suspect he is <i>not </i>referring to the theatrical events in Central Park, we might think it rather odd that the theatre critic for <i>The Guardian</i> hasn't visited New York in over thirty years. And less graciously still, if he has visited New York once or twice since the Ford years, we might wonder about the cultural clumsiness and comic clod-handedness that would have him blurble this sub-<i>sub</i>-Anthony-Lane gag and <i>like it enough</i> not to edit it out. As the alert reader said, it's obvious that he really, really loves his line. In fact, taking a cue from his own sentence, one might say that he surrendered easily to a comic mugging by a bad line. </div><div><br /></div><div>Speaking of newspapers, I thought I'd share this touchingly and oddly relevant scene from <i>Brideshead Revisited</i>: </div><div><br /></div><div></div><blockquote><div>Often, almost daily, since I had known Sebastian, some chance word in a conversation had reminded me that he was a Catholic, but I took it as a foible, like his Teddy-bear. We never discussed the matter until on the second Sunday at Brideshead . . . he surprised me by saying: "Oh dear, it's very difficult being a Catholic."</div><div>"Does it make much difference to you?"<br />"Of course. All the time."</div><div>"Well, I can't say I've noticed it. Are you struggling against temptation? You don't seem much more virtuous than me."</div><div>"I'm very, very much wickeder," said Sebastian indignantly.</div><div>"Well then?"</div><div>"Who was it who used to pray, 'Oh God, make me good, but not yet'?"</div><div>"I don't know. You, I should think."</div><div>"Why, yes, <i>I</i> do, every day. But it isn't that." He turned back to the pages of the <i>News of the World </i>and said, "Another naughty scout-master."</div><div></div></blockquote><blockquote><blockquote><div><br /></div><div><div></div></div></blockquote><div><div></div></div></blockquote><div><div>Brilliant stuff.</div></div>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-89039419478190205482011-07-14T19:46:00.009-04:002011-07-14T22:18:24.569-04:00Go Ninja GO<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; "><span><span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span><span>There are obviously two types of people in the world: those who love Die Antwoordt and readers of this blog. In the comments to my last post, there was some skepticism about my affection for <i><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cegdR0GiJl4">Enter the Ninja</a></i>, though the video is obviously the best thing to happen to popular music since, I don't know, <i>Nirvana Live and Unplugged</i>. One comment mentioned my earlier "fascination" with Tatu as if it is something I should be ashamed of. I have no regrets that I adored a melodramatic </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mGBaXPlri8">disco pop anthem</a><span> sung by a pair of teenage Russian lesbians. Do you know what Heaven is? It's not a place where nothing ever happens. It's a place where the angels are teenage Russian lesbians serenading each other with melodramatic disco pop anthems. </span></span><div><span><span><br /></span></span></div><div><span><span>Now, you might respond by saying that Tatu were "contrived", or that they weren't even lesbians. Darling, I don't go to pop music for the authenticity. I go for the magic. And Die Antwoordt is magical in a way that we barely recognise any more, so blind are we to the non-positivistic, cracked, empiricism-flaying world around us: it is the magic of myth, the modern myth of the word-hopping, body-crumping minstrel of fury, and the ancient myths of warriors and maidens; the mythical dimensions are explored, as I have been shown, far more prominently in </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbW9JqM7vho">Evil Boy</a><span>; and I can't help but love the punk bitch-slap of </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bdeizHM9OU">Rich Bich</a><span>, a faux-gilded gauntlet thrown down to ersatz modern myth-makers Lady G, Pink, and Beyonce, performed with the knowing smirk that they will look at the gauntlet and, like prim sorority sisters in a college comedy, turn on their heels and storm away with their noses in the air, superior and humiliated at once.<br /></span></span><div><span><span><br />Another comment asked if this was some kind of joke? I don't know if the commentator meant my seat-bouncing, seat-wetting enthusiasm for <i>Enter the Ninja</i> or the song itself. What is so striking about </span><i>Enter the Ninja</i><span> and Die Antwoordt is that it does not matter. How peculiar is that? Under most circumstances, whether something is or is not a joke, whether something is or is not ironic, is of the utmost importance; it's usually <i>crucial</i>. But in this case, it does not matter at all. After all, one has every right to approach Die Antwoordt with a tremendous amount of suspicion. The Ninja, Die Antwoordt, also happens to be a satirist, a comic artist, indeed, something of a comic graphic artist; his work, which melds graffiti and Haring and Basquiat graces the backdrop to </span><i>Enter the Ninja</i><span> and YoLandi Vi$$er's clothing; and some of his more obvious comic-performance work </span><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pelj-sddLiA">here</a><span> is deeply reminiscent of, ahem, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/jul/07/notebooks-euchtterm1917-moleskine">this</a>. So is it possible that Die Antwoord is another """performance"""? A sort of South African Larry the Cable Guy or a subsaharan Ben Elton mashed up with Eminem? Baron Cohen meets Kid Rock? The amazing thing is, it does not matter.<br /><br />The friend who first forwarded me the link to this video did so without providing any context: I had no idea what I was supposed to be seeing. But as we discussed it afterwards, it became apparent how similarly it affected us. Die Antwoord is unapologetic; there is no caveat, no asterisk; and still it courses through convention with all the commitment of myth (for myths are often full of the familiar, the rote, the obvious; it is only recently that we have become shamed and flushed and </span><i>embarrassed</i><span> by myths for being so unironic); it is no wonder they seem "primeval" or, as my friend put it, engaged in "paleolithic dionysian celebration" (you can see why I have so few friends; with friends who say shit like that you don't have </span><i>time</i><span> for other people). Die Antwoord is shameless, unapologetic. Comedy is always tussling with apology; one of the reasons why apology is such a problem for comedians is that their art, however brazen and bold, is already asterisked with a tiny apology (it might be called the fool's license; it might come in the form of the "just kidding" excuse where joking and kidding are already exculpatory, shedding responsibility, keyed to apology); in this case, any apology is like a magician explaining his tricks.</span></span></div><div><br /></div><div>If it turns out that Die Antwoordt is a """performance"" - <i>of course it's a performance</i> - it's a <b>next level</b> performance; if the Ninja is a persona - <i>of course it's a persona</i> - I have no problems with that; and remember: an apology is a revocation. If it turns out that this was intended comically - there would still be no revocation. The paper-thin, papier-mache mask of authenticity has been stripped away, leaving us with much more impressive, intrusive, unsettling, and exhilarating masks, faces, grimaces, expressions. </div><div><br /></div><div>A small addendum, of two points, related to faces. The video has spawned <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVqOAMLr5lY&feature=related">one new work of video art</a>. And, one of the memorable performers in the video for <i>Enter the Ninja </i>is the South African painter and DJ, Leon Botha, who frequently opened for Die Antwoordt; he died just over a month ago of <a href="http://mg.co.za/article/2011-06-06-die-antwoord-collaborator-leon-botha-dies-age-26/">complications related to the condition progeria.</a></div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; "><span><span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div></div></div>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4939540709666345656.post-12814241516187982042011-07-13T09:54:00.003-04:002011-07-13T10:19:57.903-04:00The AnswerMy blog is back from its vacation; it came back, <a href="http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2011/07/cy-twombly-the-last-classicist.html">erotically bruised</a>, pierced in odd places, and with what is either a bizarre tattoo or a gunpowder burn along its right flank. It wanted to tell me stories that might explain the haunted look in its eye and the new lisp in its voice, but I said, "Save it for your therapist; <i>I don't want to know</i>." <div><br />I must admit I missed it while it was gone, and watched <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cegdR0GiJl4">this video</a>, hour after hour, to pass the time; if I can't waste time in the blog's company, I'll find other ways to eat up the hours. I suggest watching Die Antwoord's video at least three times before going on to explore their oeuvre, which, in the term of the person who recommended them to me, is <b>next level</b>. </div><div><br /></div><div>Once you're done, we'll get back into the comedy business.</div>Sammy Wheelock aka "SW"http://www.blogger.com/profile/12838650350541903735noreply@blogger.com4