Weren't (we) Talkin' bout a Revolution?

Just a couple songs that are painfully, tragically relevant today.

Just messing around with anewed sensibility

Subsequent to an earlier post I have been exploring expressing myself through visuals, moving and stills. In the future I will be post short film experiments but for now check the stills. Note the artistic pretense.

Random Notes on The Dark Knight Rises in a topical approach

1) Enough with the Heath Ledger Joker comparisons
 I agree Ledger's Joker is a superior performance but that is partially because the Joker as crafted over 70 years of Batman storytelling is the perfect foil for Batman and one of the greatest constructions in comic book narrative. Bane, as a character, simply is not the equal to the Joker. The character does not have the time and history in the Batman chronicles. As well the relationship to Bane in the movie also pulls from Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns (Bane stands in for the leader of the Mutants). However what is important to note is that each "villain" in the series is calibrated for the Dark Knight of that moment. A great villain is able to strike at a "hero's" weak spots. Bane a man of vitality and fervor is the nemesis of a spiritually bereft, physical fragile Bruce Wayne. I like the fact that each villain: Ras al Ghul, The Scarecrow, The Joker and Bane all test the limits of Batman/BW at certain points in his career. Ras tests Batman's sense of right and wrong, The Scare Crow his sense of command over his fears, The Joker Batman's sense of order and limits on his own "power" and Bane tests Batman's faith in his city and his own desire to surrender. There is a reason why the story picks up 8 years later. It is to indicate a change in Gotham, in Bruce Wayne and the repercussions of Wayne's choices.

2) Politics and Nolan's Axe to Grind

 I don't think Nolan has a particular political agenda but seemingly Bane's class rhetoric was a device to create the frenzy necessary to drive social breakdown in Gotham. I think it was a cynical approach in that the explosion of class resentment certainly proved Bane's point about the degraded nature of Gotham's people (regardless of class). I thought the film was amazing, I am someone that loves artistic ambition. Nolan swinging for the fences ( I am enough of a USer to employ baseball metaphors) excites me. It was big and bombastic but I don't mind. I love the circularity of the story and the various bits of pieces of Batman narrative taken from various Batman stories. I like that it really became a story about Bruce Wayne (whon is the real nut to be cracked) moreso than Batman and I like that Nolan has enough confidence in the writing and the performances to let the center of interest (Batman) stay off screen for such long stretches of time. All the performances were great Anne Hathaway better than expected and Tom Hardy was as you said about stretches of the movie, hypnotic. The cultured voice emanating from yet still dis-connected from such a brawny physical persona is provocative. I probably should post something on my blog about it but I am not sure I would have something different to say about it. That being said I like that Nolan applies a Marxian reading of Batman. That is, Bruce Wayne's capitalist excesses creates the conditions that maintain the pool of "underground" denizens that he polices as Batman. In short Wayne creates the circumstances that make Batman "necessary" and Bane merely takes advantage of that dialectical contradiction.

3) Intimacy of Expression in the Midst of the Film's "Bombast"

it was a great twist and that dead fucking look in her eyes as she twists the knife, that is an element in this film the others lack a sense of being a witness to Bruce Wayne's suffereing emotional and physical. the look on his face and rarely do you ever see emotion betrayed while he wears the mask was moving as well Hathaway's reaction to is beating at the hands of Bane really made the scene

4) Random Thought While Watching
 I love how Bane's criticism of Batman's fighting style was lifted from the Frank Miller DK Returns when an old Batman fights the Mutant's leader at the garbage dump, little thigs like that show Nolan's willingness to pull all the strings of the Batman story together

in the Bubble

It's been awhile since I have said anything in this forum because I have been in a bubble of sorts. For reasons too detailed to describe I spent most of the month of June at the Maine Media Workshop. I was learning how to make documentaries but in the midst of that what I experienced was the purity of a vision. I was in a bubble with on average 50-100/week people that were just as obsessed as about visual communication as I was. For three weeks over the course of 3 week long workshops, I lived, breathed, eat, slept, drank (too much) and even shat film. I have little experience in film making so I was thrown into the deep end of the pool and loved every frustrating minute of it. I loved it not just because of the opportunity to learn but because of the community in which I was learning. Everyone, and I mean everyone I encountered was a source of knowledge, wisdom, friendship and support. In a later ost I will discuss some of the specifics of my time there but for now, the point I want to make is that there is something special and powerful about swimming in the current with your fellow enthusiasts. I  was immersed in the thing I love with a community of people that love it as much as I do. It was and may only be a once in a lifetime experience but it showed me who I was and who I could be and in y experience, existence grants no greater blessing than self realization. I want to say hello to all my comrades, friends and colleagues from Maine. These pics do not include all of the people I am thankful to and for that I apologize but know that your friendship has had a profound effect on me.

Happy Anniversary LA Riots: Or the Lessons the US Learned from Sgt. Stacy Koons

  This past April saw the 20th anniversary of the LA Rebellion (or riot depending on which political side you dangle) and the images of Rodney King remain tattooed onto the brain of a generation of citizens.

It was a sad lesson in the truths that Black people speak, as the video above had made visceral a tradition in African AMerican folk culture of the combative relations between Blacks and the police. From the song "Po Lazarus"

to hip hop group NWA (Niggas with Attitude) classic cut. Much has been said and can be said about Blacks and the criminal justice system yet there is an even more frightening lesson taught us by the trial of four of LA's Finest.
   The explosive response to the verdict was not based on the injustice of the act, again, there is a long history of police abuse, wrongful incarceration and even murder of Black people. So an innocent verdict was not new, what was new was the fact this verdict had been delivered in the face of images taken in real time of the assault on Rodney King. What the verdict said to the Black American public was, "You gon believe me, or your lying' eyes." (Richard Pryor) In essence the outright denial via verdict of the guilt of the four LA patrolmen, was an assertion of a lie so gross, "Mr King was in control of the situation," so stunning "The four officers felt threatened" in its audaciousness that it bent the warp and woof of human consciousness. In a moral universe, stars burned out in response, planets fell out of orbit and matter danced an intimate belly rub with anti-matter. The dangerous lessons taught by the trial of the four LA patrolman was that 1) we do not live in a moral universe. The arc of the moral universe? never heard of it! And 2)"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." (Joseph Goebbels).
  Mitt Romney is presently attempting to make use of the "Big Lie".

In the face of the growing evidence that Romney's core campaign stances, those used to convince Republican primary voters that he is severely conservative, are at odds with the views of most US citizens, Romney is now trying to systematically claim he was for all of Barack Obama's policies before he was against them. It is not new that politicians lie. It is not new that politicians running for the presidency, tack to the center in the general election. What is new is the hypersaturation of the media and the near absolute recording of every word public figures speak. So Romney's desire for credit for the saving of the US auto industry through direct governemt intervention buts up against this

Thus the Big Lie, the shocking, flaunting of the recorded and documented truth. Welcome to 1992.

Random thoughts on the way back

When I started this blog it was my intent to post a post a week. Obviously I have not been on point with that. But I am back due to a particularly reviving performance by the above Courtnay Bryan and now I feel like I have something to share. Random, off the cuff and not too deep, not much really but bits of something.

1) I wish George R. R. Marting would finish the damn The Song of Ice and Fire series so that I can move on with my damn life! This has got me open, novels and television show. I have even read the Dunk and Egg series of novellas. If you know what that is then you are there with me.

2)  I have lost the poetry in my words
     no longer do blue bells of sound and phrase
     trip from my tongue
     the rthym is gone
     naturally
     but I retain gentleness in my touch
     my laugh is earnest
     and I no longer hide my feelings
     being alive is sweet to me
     and I like being it with other people

3) I know I will never be a great guitarist but I am having the greatest time trying to be

4) There can never be enough adventure in a life worth living. Once again, I am trying.

I never saw the point of laughing at the oppressed

E. D. Kain asked this question (which he really didn't answer) so I had to respond

You don’t quite answer the question you ask though I think you hit some points.

1) Modern conservatism only complains, it is angry ideology that does not assert anything positive. Angry comedians or singers or any type of artists only goes so far. And how far the “angry” art goes depends on the level of artistry. Like the art of the 3rd International it is most concerned with articulating a didactic message as opposed to attaining a level of lyricism through the commitment aesthetic excellence. There has been angry leftist art (ex. Pablo Piucasso’s epic painting Guernica) but what was that work angry about (slaughter, death, and the abuses of power)? What are contemporary conservatives angry about? Women making decisions about there health. Minorities being given opportunities to live better lives, the privileged having to share their privilege.

2) Pop culture is that exactly popular culture, it is the voice of the masses their expression of their views about the world. Conservatives despite their rhetoric are most concerned with the views of those in charge. The messages being expressed through conservative pop art does not reach out to the masses of people because those are not the views of the masses.

3) Corny. Conservative attempts at pop culture are corny because the “values” conservatives seek to uphold, are no longer ubiquitous to modern US culture. Conservatives seek to preserve or are in touch with values of eras long past (which never really existed as they remember) and no one wants to go back to because we would not consider youth culture before rock and roll worth participating in. The types of attitudes, behaviours and figures that encourage creative expression and serve as examples of the possibilities of popular culture are spurned by conservatives. Who do you want as your generational symbol of creativity and expression, Pat Boone and his descendant or Little Richard and his?

4) Independence. Conservatism despite its rhetoric is not interested in individuality that is different from its expectations. That means certain types of creativity (rebellious, outrageous, subversive) are not encouraged, and what follows isn that certain types of creativity don’t yield interesting results.
ipso facto Conservative pop culture is boring as shit.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the arrogance and tone deafness that modern conservativism displays. Case in point to "Old School" Founding Fathers rapper at the Conservatism Political Action Convention. Check it at 1:53 where it becomes even too much for a Black Conservative to bear.

There Are New Stories Even Within Old Peoples or I Can Be More Than Nobly American

While sitting in a formerly hip bar in Brooklyn, I had a few last minute 2011 drinks with a good friend. As usual my friend and I talked about current film.  I mentioned a trailer I saw for a new film coming out about the Tuskegee Airmen called Red Tails.

My friend made the comment that he would see the film despite his reservations.  "What reservations?' He said, "Going to see it is like listening to India Arie, its okay but you do it because it feels like the right thing to do." "What?" My friend continued, "Look, the Tuskegee Airmen though a great moment in African American history falls into the same stories that always get told about African American people. We are long suffering, noble, proud, square jawed, yadda yadda, yadda. It seems each one of these types of noble negro movies (initiated in the post WW II liberal Hollywood ex. Home of the Brave (1949) and perfected by Sidney Poitier), becomes a justification for our presence here and now. The same types of stories keep getting told when there are a whole lot of other types of stories about our lives that just aren't getting told."

Flash forward a day later, enter a story that damn sure needs to get told. IF you are living in a culturalized zone (i.e. one where the new cultural expressions are displayed consistently) than when it gets to your town do your self a huge favor and go see the new film, Pariah.

Pariah, is the story of a gay teenage girl in New York whose is juggling her sexual identity along with her familial and social identity. First time director Dee Rees gives the viewer a jagged and real  story, that avoids political grand standing and depicts a young woman trying to figure out how to be who she is in her world. Adepeo Oduye plays Alike, a a 17 year old high schooler, who knows she is woman identified but is playing a cat and mouse game with her family. Her parents played by Charles Pernell and (doing a Mo'Nique turn) long time comedienne Kim Wayans artfully depict the extremes of homophobia. The mother avoids articulating the fact that her eldest daughter is gay but announces it in her constant attempts at imposing a hetero-girly identity on her daughter. "Don't you like the new blouse I bought you? It shows off your figure." And the father, forever cherishing daddy's little girl, is in deep denial about what everyone else seems to know.
  The film excels at exploring the nuanced world of a mature self awareness having to live in an immature environment.  Alike knows who she is and is settled in that identity. There are no scenes of self hate, self recrimination or shame for being who she is. What we see are the beginning, exploratory and at times uncertain, steps of a a girl consciously becoming the woman she wants to be. Alike only once describes herself as gay and only to repeat it to her mother after her mother calls her a "dyke" and to finally burst her father's denial.
  Not all of the characters respond to Alike's sexuality with hostility, captured is the reality of the open sexual curiousity and flexibility of Alike's peers. As another student says within purposeful earshot of Alike, "I like girls but I love boys." Alike's new "friend" Bina, played by Aasha Davis recognizes Alike's social awkwardness for what it is, discomfort with the assumed discomfort others have with her and seemingly embraces her, only to play sex with an aversion to lesbian identity ("I'm not gay. I'm just doing my thing . .  . You don't have to tell anybody, okay?"). And Laura, (Pernell Walker), Alike's closest friend, a young out lesbian, estranged from her mother and working while studying for her GED, understands Alike's mix of social and sexual confidence and uncertainty, yet is estranged from her broad cultural consciousness (Alike is a poet and aesthete).
  What is excellently depicted is/are the floating sets of relationships to same sex sexuality and gender bending. The overlap of class, culture and sexuality in Alike's life and the complexity of responses to these overlaps realizes a much more convoluted coming of age story. Pariah is more than a gay outsider story but one that makes real the possibilities of life for LGBT teenagers. The community and institutions that provide support for Laura are islands of escape that show worlds of affirmation. Being an LGBT teen does not make Alike and Laura essential outsiders to their communities but hetero-normativity and homophobia are at the margins of their worlds and exist as aberrant sensibilities. There are no depictions of evil lesbians in this film. What is depicted as evil and monstrous are the family members that turn their backs on daughters and those that manipulate earnest feelings.
  Pariah is a mesmerizing painfulful and beautiful film whose emotions are as crisp as pen and ink sketches yet whose yet whose feelings are suffuse with deep colors. It in some ways reminds me of the 1992 film Just Another Girl on the IRT, in that it is able to transform a sociological question into a living breathing person without descending into caricature, stereotype or broad and simplistic judgment. In short these movies are the type that need to be made about Black people, movies about Black people.