So I promised a Gertrude Stein post to offset all the Tarantino material.

I just recently got done reading Tender Buttons, Stein's classic 1914 work. It's pretty wild stuff for any time, but especially for 1914. Part of the fun of reading this book has been trying to figure out what, exactly, the surrounding context for this intriguing piece of work might be. I know very little about Stein's biography, and this poem bears almost no resemblance to any other piece of pre-World War I poetry I've ever read. Critics often claim that Stein writes in a "Cubist" style-- whether Stein herself made this comparison I do not know --and with the Cubists emerging in France around 1907 this could be a potential lead, although I can't instinctively see the paralells between Cubism and the writing here.

Her project-- which seems to be largely centered around driving a wedge between language and content --would seem to place her within the tradition of the language poets, although she's about seventy years early to that party. I could also place her in the "prose poetry" tradition, but that really seems to take off around 1960 -- she'd be one of the first people to ever write such a thing (in English at least).

But this throws me right back into the question of context. What on earth could have been going on in her head to get her to just invent stuff like this out of whole cloth?

Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary

Tuesday, October 28, 2003
5:45 PM
0 comments

This will be my last Quentin Tarantino post for a while, lest this become an all-Tarantino blog. Leftover scraps on various topics:

Textual poaching

Interview with Tarantino, where he discusses the (many) stylistic influences on Kill Bill, and, in particular, the casting of kung-fu stars like Sonny Chiba and Gordon Liu:

"As I am framing shots, I'm thinking 'I can't believe Gordon Liu is in my movie! I can't believe it.' And to have been so influenced by seventies kung fu films and to have, as far as I'm concerned, my three favorite stars of kung fu from three different countries .. Gordon Liu representing Hong Kong. Sonny Chiba representing Japan. And David Carradine representing America. That's a triple header. A triple crown. If Bruce Lee was still alive, he'd be in it."

There's a whole theory that could be written that involves Quentin Tarantino as the world's most successful creator of fan fiction. If you wanted to give it an academic spin you could say he's doing textual poaching.

Artifice

Same interview. Tarantino on the artifice of the Kill Bill "universe":

"this whole movie takes place in this special universe. This isn't the real world ... this is a movie universe and in this universe, people carry samurai swords. Not only do they carry samurai swords, not only can you bring a samurai sword on an airplane, there's a place on the airplane seat to put your samurai sword!"

If I want to think through Tarantino's relationship to artifice any further I have to think more about Tarantino's relationship to Godard, a filmmaker who Tarantino has referenced repeatedly as an influence and who has also made a body of work that deals explicitly with cinema as artifice (and who also shares a fascination with themes of crime, race, femininity, etc.). I've seen maybe a half-dozen Godard films and although they're all interesting, I can't say that I have a really good grasp on Godard's "project." An area for more research...

Metareference

Fred Coppersmith writes in with a quote from the New Yorker's profile of Tarantino:

"When [Tarantino] draws up a contract with Miramax, he has his lawyer include an unusual provision that secures him all the rights to the characters in the future, so that nobody can use them -- for sequels or spinoffs or marketing or anything else -- without his permission, and so that he can use them again himself in a movie whenever he likes. He intends gradually to build a whole Tarantino world, so that his movies intersect with one another. He has already started doing this: Mr. White, of Reservoir Dogs, used to do jobs with Alabama, the heroine of True Romance; Vic Vega, of Reservoir Dogs, is related to Vincent Vega, of Pulp Fiction."

Of course, Pulp Fiction / True Romance / Reservoir Dogs all occur in a universe operating at a particular level of mimetic fidelity, whereas Kill Bill operates at an entirely different level. This hasn't stopped Kevin Smith from doing something similar: all three movies in the "Jersey Trilogy" operate at different levels of realism, but the characters cross effortlessly between them. This reaches its inevitable nadir in the abysmal Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, which proves that a movie can understand meta-referentiality and still be dumb as a post.

Authenticity

My pal Laura has written a provocative response to my reading of Jackie Brown; check it out.

Libidinal narrative

Kill Bill comes pretty close to fulfilling my criteria for a feature-length movie driven by libidinal narrative. Dramatic tension (mostly) doesn't function in the film in any traditional way: there is rarely any doubt in our mind about the outcome of any given battle that "the Bride" engages in--even though her adversaries are equally skilled. As a result, a lot of the pleasure of the film comes from watching a super-powerful entity destroy other super-powerful entities. A weirdly contemporary sort of plot.

OK. Tomorrow I will write about something else. Possibly Gertrude Stein.

Labels: media commentary, narrative

Tuesday, October 21, 2003
9:00 PM
0 comments

OK, time for the big Kill Bill writeup (contains mild spoilers):

As expected, this movie is not about people, it is about other movies. Most of the characters have no interiority whatsoever, and those that do only have the bare minimum necessary to create pathos or to advance the ruthless machine of the plot. This is a questionable tactic, especially when dealing with a film that features members of another race—I have long believed that racism in representation begins at the exact moment when an artist denies interiority to the racial "others" that they represent, and indeed, some have condemned Kill Bill for what they perceive as its racism.

It's worth noting that Tarantino is by no means the only filmmaker of recent years to deny minority characters their interiority: one need only look to Lost In Translation or some of the films of Wes Anderson to see other examples. To me, these other examples are more troublesome because those other filmmakers don't share Tarantino's larger project of exploring genre, or his repeated explicit underlining genre as artifice, an end to which the clever usage of stereotype is in fact the very means. It's true that when we watch Uma Thurman mow down eighty-eight Yakuza, those Yakuza aren't granted full personhood—but the whole set-piece during which this occurs is patently fantastic. Nothing in it bears any resemblance to a recognizable reality. The characters (inasmuch as they are "characters" at all, I'm more prone to describe them as "signifiers") reference not real-world Asians, or real-world assassin-women, for that matter, but rather these same signifiers as they appear in other films. And in this I think Tarantino is enormously successful.

This film also continues the project of exploring the cultural politics of authenticity, a project begun in earnest in Jackie Brown. Asianness is Kill Bill's version of Jackie Brown's blackness: the exotic ethnicity that has the power to connote authenticity. Witness the scene where "The Bride" is in Okinawa: when she poses as a tourist just learning Japanese she comes across as flaky, but when she reveals that she is actually fluent she seems serious and sober; hard-core, authentic. Another example would be the Hattori Hanzo katana she attains, which has the literal stamp of authenticity upon it. Etc etc.

Jackie Brown takes a naturalistic approach to critiquing the notion that authenticity can be derived through cultural affiliation. Kill Bill takes the opposite approach: critiquing it by highlighting the lunacy of deriving our sense of the authentic from something that is so clearly artifice. By straight-facedly amping up the cartoony elements of the film, Tarantino makes it impossible for us to use the film to shore up our sense of our own authenticity. The metacommentary happening in the film functions the same way: by casting Sonny Chiba as Hattori Hanzo, it makes it difficult for us to see Hanzo as a "real" Asian savant. We look at Hanzo but see Chiba, star of a hundred kung-fu movies.

(Jonathan Rosenbaum, of the Chicago Reader, treats Kill Bill as a response to Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog, and I think the contrast between the films is fruitful: I love Jarmusch as a director, but I think his use of Asian and African-American culture as markers of authenticity is far less complicated, far less critical, than Tarantino's.)

Inasmuch as they are films about "Asianness" and blackness, Kill Bill and Jackie Brown are also both films about Caucasianness. Kill Bill refers repeatedly to Uma Thurman's blond hair and blue eyes; at one point Lucy Liu refers to her explicitly as a "Caucasian girl who likes to play with samurai swords." Swap "boy" for "girl" and Tarantino emerges. And I'm beginning to think that Tarantino's ultimate point is that the defining feature of Caucasian identity is its capacity to appropriate, its ability to select from all available genres. (Consider Tarantino's oft-praised ability to create eclectic soundtracks.) Perhaps Tarantino sees a chameleonic nature to be, in fact, the only identity that rings "authentic" in an market-driven, postmodern, imperialistic society, a kind of "meta-authenticity." (It is worth pointing out here that part of why a lot of people (myself included) admire Japanese film and music is less because of its authenticity and more because of its appropriative qualities: it may not be an accident that Kill Bill prominently features the 5,6,7,8s, a Japanese girl-rock band.)

This of course raises a whole set of thorny questions about who has the power to appropriate, but the crazy network of cross-cultural appropriation is material for a whole nother set of posts.

Anyway. I hope the second volume of Kill Bill will be as interesting as this first one: I am especially interested to see what Tarantino is planning to do with the Michael Madsen character, who briefly appears in Kill Bill Vol. 1 looking exactly like Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs, down to the cheap suit and everything, leaving me wondering whether Tarantino was preparing to meta-reference his own oeuvre, which, as you can probably tell, would thrill me.

Labels: media commentary, race

Monday, October 20, 2003
3:23 PM
0 comments

OK, so here are some of my thoughts on Jackie Brown (contains mild spoilers):

I think Jackie Brown is a movie that's about cultural membership and its related bugaboo, authenticity. One potentially "authentic" culture that the film examines is the culture of the criminal underworld, a culture that Tarantino explicitly explores as artifice in his earlier films. That project is continued here. The arms dealer Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) initially appears to be a criminal mastermind but we're almost immediately told by Bridget Fonda's character that this is a ruse, that really he's slow-witted, "just repeating things that he's heard from other people." Even more pointedly, we have Robbie's clients, who all want to be outfitted with .45s because they've seen them featured prominently in the Hong Kong crime film The Killer. (This example, with its shrewd suggestion that one's sense of authenticity is compromised by one's awareness of authentic-seeming artifice, is key to my understanding of Kill Bill.)

The other culture that the film explores is African-American culture. I don't need to tell anyone that participation in African-American culture is commonly thought of as a special marker of authenticity; Tarantino's earlier films, which use race in a way that is not particularly reflective, can perhaps serve as key illustrations of that mindset. However, Jackie Brown makes a fairly substantial efforts to complicate this conception. When Robbie first meets Max Cherry (Robert Forster), he looks at a photo of Cherry and his African-American assistant, Winston (Tom 'Tiny' Lister, Jr.) and remarks that the photo makes Cherry and Winston seem "tight." He then immediately critiques this bond as artifice, by reminding Cherry that Winston is his employee, and then by suggesting that the photo must have been Cherry's idea—a suggestion which Cherry, notably, does not refute.

(Robbie himself spends some of the film building a friendship with a Caucasian, Robert DeNiro's Louis Vara, going so far as to bestow upon him the authenticity-endowing title of "nigga." Vara fails, however, to live up to the standard that the title would imply: he's the film's biggest dunce, and by film's end the friendship has been dramatically retracted.)

But back to Cherry, who is the film's key character. The film invests some energy in exploring Cherry's relationship to African-American culture by way of his relationship to a piece of cultural product: he is introduced to the R&B group the Delfonics by Jackie Brown (Pam Grier), and later he goes out and buys a tape of their music. It is not hard to see Cherry here as a stand-in for Tarantino; someone enamored with the African-American culture he glimpses through the (distorting, artificial) world of popular culture. Significantly, the pleasure Cherry takes in this music stands as his most a "successful" moment of participating (however minutely) in African-American culture: during the film's climactic car ride, Robbie looks at Cherry with a kind of respect and says "I didn't know you liked the Delfonics."

This moment of participation, however, allows him no substantially deeper membership in African-American culture: at the end of the film he remains a Caucasian bail bondsman with an African-American employee, and the fledgling romance with Brown is left (mostly) unrealized. The film's recognition of the real social force of cultural difference distinguishes it happily from a film like Bulworth, where Warren Beatty lives out the fantasy of being a Caucasian deemed "authentic" by virtue of successful participation in African-American culture (symbolized most egregiously by his bedding of Nina (Halle Berry)).

Still more to say, but this is at least the base of it.

Thursday, October 16, 2003
6:35 PM
0 comments

So last night I revisited Jackie Brown, in light of the "genre artist" stuff I was saying about Tarantino earlier this week.

I have a lot to say about the film, and some of it has to do with genre but a lot of it has to do with the film's take on race and culture, which I think is more complex than it might intially appear. I'd start digging into it right now if I didn't have this mess of papers to grade. Instead I'll save it for later.

One thing I will say right now, though, is that I think I was wrong when I said that Tarantino's later work lacks the personal subtext of the earlier work. Jackie Brown can definitely be read as a film that reveals a particular yearning which I think is autobiographical.

Tonight: Kill Bill. I'll post my take on it tomorrow, hopefully.

Wednesday, October 15, 2003
11:18 AM
0 comments

I added a new dream to my dream journal for the first time in nearly a year. It's about LSD and improvisational music.

Labels: dreams

Tuesday, October 14, 2003
11:29 AM
0 comments

In the new issue of the Paris Review Amy Hempel attributes this quote to Gordon Lish: "Wear your heart on your sleeve, and people will read to find out how you solved being alive."

A lovely sentiment, although I don't think of Lish as being a writer who has ever particularly worn his heart on his sleeve. Perhaps I need to revisit him. I like the quote, in any case.

More of the Hempel interview can be read here.

Also: farewell to Paris Review founder George Plimpton.

Monday, October 13, 2003
3:49 PM
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I haven't seen Kill Bill yet, but based on the previews I'm guessing that it will confirm a hypothesis I have about Quentin Tarantino, namely: Tarantino doesn't make movies about people, he makes movies about other movies. I'm guessing that Kill Bill is going to enter into dialogue with the genres of kung-fu and samurai films in much the same way that Jackie Brown enters into dialogue with the genre of "blaxploitation", or (perhaps more relevantly) that the Tarantino-scripted From Dusk Till Dawn enters into dialogue with the Western and vampire horror.

I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with this—I'm interested in genre, and I think that it can certainly be a valid thematic concern for movies. One of the things I enjoy about Tarantino's films is that they commonly contain a level of meta-commentary: Jackie Brown, for instance, operates on one level as a serviceable crime drama, but operates at an entirely different level when the viewer has an awareness of Pam Grier's acting history (or for that matter, the acting history of Robert Forster). John Travolta in Pulp Fiction works in a similar way. Tarantino's segment in Four Rooms works only if you're familiar with the "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" bit that it riffs off of. Etcetera.

The genre-play in Tarantino's very early work (I'm thinking particularly of Reservoir Dogs and Tarantino's script for True Romance) is even more interesting because it can be read as strangely personal. Both of these films focus on someone who operates mostly outside of the criminal subculture that the films are fascinated with. This role is filled in both films by a young, white "Generation X"-type character—True Romance's comic-book-store clerk Clarence, and Reservoir Dogs's comic-book-reading policeman Freddy. If we treat the other characters, the underworld types, as essentially genre figures (Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs explicitly calls out Mr. Blonde as a riff on Lee Marvin) then the fascination that the slacker protagonists demonstrate towards those characters strikes a distinct, oddly poingant autobiographical note: it is not hard to imagine young Tarantino, whose former career as a video-store clerk is well known, writing these scripts to explore his fascination with the artificial worlds that operate within genre. (It may be significant here that True Romance is littered with references to the LA movie industry and in fact ends with a shootout within a Hollywood director's offices.)

Pulp Fiction is especially curious and knotty. The distinction between the Gen-X outsider and the more hard-boiled genre characters collapses here. There is no obvious outsider figure, but all of the criminal characters seem to have taken on a Gen-X quality: great chunks of the film are given over to mundane discussions of pop culture minutia (what they call a Big Mac in France, etc.). (This has its counterpoint in the "Like A Virgin" speech in Reservoir Dogs, but there it is something of an anomaly, whereas in Pulp Fiction those kinds of discussions are much more the norm.) In addition, K. points out that while Reservoir Dogs and True Romance can be understood as narratives about an outsider attempting to get inside the world of genre, Pulp Fiction is instead about an insider trying to leave that world (Samuel L. Jackson's Jules Winnfield), to get back (as K. puts it) to a world where "language has meaning." I'm hesitant to read that as an autobiographical gesture, but it does lead interestingly to the less genrefied (although highly genre-conscious), more naturalistic world of Jackie Brown.

And now we have Kill Bill, which seems like it will be hyper-genrefied, if I may indulge in coining such an unsightly term. There are legitimate complaints that could be made about Tarantino, no doubt, but there are really interesting things happening throughout his entire body of work, and I wouldn't miss a new film of his for the world.

Labels: media commentary

Sunday, October 12, 2003
1:03 PM
0 comments

Screening in Chicago this week: The Backyard, a film about amateur wrestling leagues. Amateur wrestling is a key point in the constellation of nihilistic suburban daredevil activity and so I'm eager to check out the film.

This interview with filmmaker Paul Hough suggests that perhaps amateur wrestling is not exclusively a suburban activity. Instead he takes a "media determinism" angle:

"Q: Is backyard wrestling truly a worldwide phenomenon?

A: Yes. It’s wherever wrestling is shown on TV."

I still think that backyard wrestling could only have been born in the suburbs—anyplace more rural faces a shortage of wrestlers, anyplace more urban faces a shortage of backyards.

Anyway. Between this and Kill Bill it is likely to be a bloody, bloody week.

Friday, October 10, 2003
1:10 PM
0 comments

I've done a list of 100 favorite things at least once a year for over ten years now, as a way of taking stock of good things in my life. I realized this morning that it's been a year since I last made such a list (here's the old one), so I just took the time to make up a new one. Here goes:

1. coffee

2. computers

3. photocopiers

4. thinking

5. spiral-bound index cards

6. reading in the tub

7. cities

8. abandoned buildings

9. graffiti and street art

10. public transportation

11. generative processes

12. experimental music

13. trails and paths

14. roadtrips

15. mix tapes / mix CDs

16. greasy spoons

17. cafés

18. being inside the homes of people I care about

19. inspecting bookshelves

20. word of mouth

21. libraries

22. collections

23. independent bookstores

24. record shopping

25. narrative

26. hypertext

27. the Internet

28. smut

29. sex

30. hooking up with someone for the first time

31. hooking up with someone who’s been my lover for a long time

32. nonmonogamy

33. old friends

34. writing letters / getting mail

35. the spring conference

36. unitarians

37. making music

38. writing

39. drawing

40. sketchbooks

41. pigma pens

42. effects pedals

43. the wire

44. the empty bottle

45. brian eno

46. john cage

47. drones

48. imaginary year

49. collaboration

50. improvisation

51. number none

52. comics

53. board games

54. role-playing games

55. inventing games

56. data visualization

57. japanese design

58. japanese music

59. zen buddhism

60. body literacy

61. cycles

62. hybridization

63. zines

64. novels

65. science fiction

66. david cronenberg

67. david lynch

68. hal hartley

69. jim jarmusch

70. teaching

71. projects

72. things my friends made for me

73. digital cameras

74. corrosion patterns

75. decasia

76. my dinner with andre

77. slacker

78. italo calvino’s invisible cities

79. jorge luis borges’ labyrinths

80. ben marcus’ the age of wire and string

81. information

82. misinformation

83. conspiracy theories

84. collage

85. rubber cement

86. photoshop and illustrator

87. chocolate

88. ice cream

89. eating a meal with someone

90. solitude

91. audiomulch

92. gift economies

93. serialized narratives

94. buffy the vampire slayer seasons 2-6

95. maps

96. seasons

97. taking walks

98. conversations

99. indexes

100. lists
     

I love reading about other people's favorites, so if you want to make me a happy man, make a list like this and send it to jeremy AT invisible-city.com.

Labels: lists

Tuesday, October 07, 2003
10:12 AM
0 comments

In a phone conversation this week, my friend Eric B. remarked that he'd recently heard people turning the term "zeitgeist" into an adjective: "zeitgeisty." Both of us agreed that the word sounded kind of disgusting. "Faintly digestive," I said.

As its title might imply, Bruce Sterling's Globalhead is a book that aspires to be zeitgeisty, and often it succeeds. The book's thirteen stories touch on lots of last-quarter-of-the-twentieth-century hot points: Islamic fundamentalism, American pop culture, the collapsed Soviet Union, celebrity as political capital, nanotech, black market economies, abortifacients, rock music (American and Japanese), and (sigh) Lester Bangs.

It's a decent read, although the stories mostly feel faintly thin, underdeveloped. They are, for the most part, stories built around one good(-ish) idea. (I should say here that I'm not the hugest fan of science-fiction short stories in general. I like SF for its world-building qualities, and short stories often have the problem that by the time they've set up the parameters of their worlds, it's time for them to end. This is probably part of why my favorite SF short stories are ones that take place in a world further developed elsewhere (say, Gibson's "Burning Chrome" or "Johnny Mnemonic") or stories in an extended story cycle (say, the Shaper/Mechanist cycle in Sterling's Crystal Express)).

A richer work, and one equally zeitgeisty, is Douglas Coupland's Microserfs, which I enjoyed far more than I expected to. It's slightly dated (©1995, after all) and occasionally its glibness irritates, but the book is spilling over with provocative ideas. Coupland is so full of trenchant observations and clever aphorisms and zany theories that he can just spill them loosely throughout the book.

This prediction struck me as uniquely prescient:

"We decided that in game shows in the future, contestants will win a free focus-grouping, where they spend six hours with ten demographically preselected focus-groupers commenting [on] and criticizing all aspects of their lives."

The characters are obsessed with pop culture and trivia, they lack a coherent sense of politics, and they have no critique of power—but for my money this representation hits the nail right on its zeitgeisty little head.

Monday, October 06, 2003
7:23 PM
0 comments

From the Kaffe Matthews interview in Issue 235 of The Wire:

"A couple of years ago I was talking to a funder from the visual arts world ... they were suddenly realizing that electronic improvised music was speaking in the language that they spoke in—that it involved texture, density, color, grain, size and shape."

I completely agree with this, although for me personally there's a key difference between visual arts and music, which is the crucial temporal dimension: a painting "happens" all at once, whereas a piece of music (with the possible exception of something like an ambient installation piece) has a duration. So: music is painting plus time.

The same could conceivably be said of film (see Tarkofsky) although I'd argue that the most "painterly" films—the ones Matthews' criteria most usefully apply to—would be non-narrative, non-representational film (see Stan Brakhage).

Saturday, October 04, 2003
1:45 PM
0 comments

I like this prose poem by Anthony Tognazzini: "I'd Heard She Had A Deconstructive Personality."

But I especially like what he says in this brief interview:

"[T]he central unique characteristic of [prose poems and flash fiction], for me, is their ability to bridge gaps and absences, to imply and provide connections between seemingly disparate elements, to create connections where none seemed previously to exist. In conventional narrative the gaps between events and ideas are overtly linked through plain exposition; in conventional poetry the gaps are represented spatially and symbolically on the page. But in pp/ff we are locked in a box with the things of life, and no instruction manual save our proximity to these things, and the implication that they somehow fit together."

I love this description, and am currently involved in attempting to write a piece of fiction that does the same thing, only over the course of a novel-length manuscript. This is part of what I mean when I refer to "cryptonarrative."

Tognazzini's poem, and Double Room, the journal of flash fiction and prose poetry that contains it, were found via Ron Silliman.

Labels: writing

Wednesday, October 01, 2003
9:00 PM
0 comments

Longtime associate D Bauler provides us with a refreshingly contrarian anti-Lester-Bangs rant.

I've never read any Lester Bangs, so I can't say with authority that db is on the right track here, but I can say that people who cite Bangs as an influence are often horrible writers, prone to all manner of hyperbolic excess. This especially comes to light when the Bangs-disciples write about Bangs himself.

For instance, the newest issue of The Believer features an unreadable review of the new collection of Bangs' essays, which is almost entirely composed of overwritten passages like:

"Bangs practiced criticism as a hilarious form of guerrilla class warfare, the revenge of the starving underclass (as much in existential as economic terms) against the proudly oblivious Overclass, the bourgeois-boho-yoyos, the Middle-C brows furrowed in rigid anal-retentive concentration, and indeed the High ideals of Class itself, understood as a plumy nexus of ego-massaging rationalizations, humorless self-importance, affluent pretensions, good table manners, solid musicianship, starched professionalism, and an insatiable appetite for respectability at all costs. Discomfiting the comfortable and afflicting the affected was what he lived for—'you cannot kick intentional cripples awake,' but gee, Officer Krupke, it sure is fun to try anyway—but there was something more at stake than just being a gadfly freelancing boils or a chaotic court-jesting nusiance."

Save me.

A longer rant about The Believer in general is coming soon. (Short version: I'm undecided.)

3:05 PM
0 comments